Master Isambard Ravenclaw sings "The Bell":
I was in an Elizabethan mood last night and made this project with Midjourney + Suno + HeyGen came forth. Captions have been improved. Usually I write what I enter in Suno, be it my own poetry, or song lyrics based on my poetry, or texts rendered in one of my constructed languages, but I had ChatGPT write this verse just to see what it would do. I think it's well done and appropriate for the topic.
The rats have learned our psalms by heart,
they gnaw between each word,
The castle coughs in candlelight, no prayer has yet been heard.
We scrape our bowls for broth and hope, the broth is mostly air,
Black marks appear like fingerprints the saints forgot were there.
The bell drags on, the bell drags on, it will not make us brave,
We shuffle past the chapel door toward the open grave.
Sing soft, sing slow, don’t wake the dead or tempt their rage—Elizabethan doom, good lord, we’re losing to the Plague.
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Master Isambard’s biography, as assisted by ChatGPT:
Master Isambard Ravenclaw was born in the latter half of the sixteenth century to a minor gentry family whose fortunes thinned with each passing generation. Educated briefly in letters and scripture, he showed early aptitude for verse and music, but little inclination for inheritance or courtly ambition. When plague swept through his region and claimed both kin and patronage, Isambard abandoned the path laid before him and took instead to the roads. He carried with him a viol, a weathered notebook of poems, and an ear tuned to sorrow. His songs were not the polished entertainments of court masques but slow, intimate laments shaped by grief, faith, and the unease of a country repeatedly undone by disease, hunger, and rumor. He became known in inns, cloisters, and market edges as a singer whose voice could still a room not by force, but by recognition.
In later years, Isambard was called Ravenclaw not for noble heraldry, but for his habit of lingering at thresholds, ruins, and hedgerows where ravens gathered, listening as if the land itself were speaking. He refused titles and patronage alike, believing that proximity to power dulled the truth of song. His clothing grew threadbare, his melodies darker, yet his presence carried a gravity that outlasted finery. Some claimed he had once loved deeply and lost without burial; others said he sang for the dead when no priest would come. By the time of his disappearance, his verses had already begun to circulate anonymously, copied by hand, altered, and sung by others. Kings were forgotten. Plagues receded. But the songs of Isambard Ravenclaw remained, traveling onward without him, as all true laments do.
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Next, I shall re-do the Suno recording so it is more consistent with the English that Isambard would have written and spoken at that time:
The ratts have learn’d our psalmes by rote, and gnaw betwixt each word,
The castell coughs by candle-glow; no prayer is yet preferr’d.
We scrape our bowles for broth and hope, the broth is thinnest ayre,
Blacke markes arise like finger’d blots no saint hath setled there.
The bell doth dragge, the bell doth dragge, it will not lend us hart,
We passe the chappell doore full soft towarde the grave’s blacke part.
Sing lowe, sing slowe, provoke not wrath nor stirre the dead from sleep—
O dolefull times, O England’s bane, we yeeld unto the Plague.
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A Remembrance writ in the Booke of Master Isambard Ravenclaw
Written this xxiiij of October, in the yeare of Our Lord 1596, being the xxxiij yeare of my age:
I set this downe not for the eies of men, who have small stomach for such inward reckonings, but to quiet mine owne heart, which beateth louder than any knuckle upon a doore. The nights wax long, and oft I hearken for footfall where none approacheth. In the hedgerowes the winde holdeth counsell with the dead, and I misdoubt me sorely that I doe too well conceive their meaning. Once I did perswade my selfe that song might amend a thing, or at the least call it by its right name; yet now I know it serveth rather to keepe a man companie whilst the wound abideth unclos’d.
I have wander’d from parish unto parish, and in each found the selfsame sorrow, onely apparell’d in sundrie fashions. Where bells are rung, they ring for losse; where bread is broken, it is never sufficient. And yet I sing still. Not for coine, nor favour, nor the soft falsehood of ease, but because silence, long suffer’d, groweth cruell. If God doth heare me, He is marvellous still; if He heare me not, then these poore wordes are all the prayer I holde. I seeke no monument but breath and vanishing sound, trusting that what is true needeth no keeping, for it remembereth it selfe.
