Published on October 2, 2025 9:46 PM GMT
A year ago I stumbled across a couplet that seared itself into my mind:
"The excellent violence of young stars
Is that they devour their own nurseries".
A year later, I got it into my head to invest some character points into writing. Standard advice says you should analyse writing you like, to develop a writer's ear. So here I am, finally analysing why this couplet made such an impression on me.
There are a few things that stand out: first, the language is high perplexity. The word choices are unusual, but evocative. "Excellent violence" is surely a rare phrase. Rarer yet to ascribe it to stars. And why young stars? A supernova might make sense, but to young stars, happen it does not.
"Devour their own nurseries" is equally striking. "Devour" conjures to my mind wide-open jaws, great bites making quick work of a meal. It feels fierce, almost primal. Alive in a way that "eat" is not. This imagery is immediately contrasted with "nurseries", bringing to mind an infant.
Moreover, after a moment's thought, the end of the couplet collapses the uncertainty in my mind that the couplet's built up since the beginning. We're talking about star formation! A sublime event if there ever was one, almost sacred in its beauty. Now we understand why "excellent" was used, and where the violent devouring comes in. Now we see why we're discussing young stars and nurseries. Now our perspective snaps into place: we're seeing a star born. It all makes sense.
Let's circle back to the use of contrasts. This occurs both at the local and global levels. "Excellent violence", "young stars" and "devour their own nurseries" are the local examples. Violence and excellence rarely go together, stars grow so absurdly old that it is hard to see them as young, and surely only some insectoid horror can devour its own nursery? And yet, each usage is true.
Globally, the choice of wording in the couplet gives off an air of ... primal truths? Brutal honesty about the realities of life? Not quite those, but when I read this, it felt savage, beastly and noble all. Yet that clashes with the content of the couplet. A nebula giving birth to stars is evocative of, well, birth. Wombs, motherhood, gentle nurturing, motherly embrace. Old life, sacrificing itself for new.
I think that gets at most of what strikes me about this couplet. I'm not sure if it gets at everything, though. In order to do that, it would suffice to use these insights to make more couplets and see if I've captured the magic. Which is lucky for me, as part of the process of generating these insights involved trying out variations using the insights I'd built up so far, contrasting them with the couplet, and inspecting the diff for inspiration.
Here's what I came up with.
"The horrible patience of old children" (I wanted to evoke something like "youth is wasted on the young".)
"The horrible virtue of old nations
Is that they rape their own Eden"
"The hateful blessings of old mayflies
is that they entomb their own young."
"The terrible blessings of old embryos
is that they are birthed into Eden."
That's about as far as I got. None of these are as good as the original IMO, but they carry something of its flavour. They have some of the vividity, some of the local contrast and perplexity. But the subject-matter isn't as attractive as that of the couplet. Or as obviously true and familiar. So once the reader finishes them, the drop in perplexity, from complex to simple, isn't as great. And I think I failed to achieve the global contrast that was required.
So while I failed to capture the magic, I think my analysis does succeed, because it can discriminate between my failed imitations and the original. Which an AI wrote BTW, one of those strange little bots in the cyborgism simcluster, an esoteric cousin to truth_terminal. That probably contributed to why I found this couplet so striking.
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