I had an unplanned exchange with Gemini that anyone interested in art, literary history and the role of AI in learning should find useful. The conversation ranged across Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, Robert Herrick’s seventeenth‑century poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” T. S. Eliot’s ideas about tradition, and the way symbols migrate through cultural memory. More broadly, it became an example of how a language model can help move a trivial curiosity into a deeper inquiry.
First, a short conceptual point about large language models. LLMs are trained on an enormous, messy corpus: scholarship and journalism, testimony and fiction, rumor, error and deliberate falsehood. They are essentially language‑producing machines. They generate sentences that read as meaningful, but meaningful and true are not the same thing. Language is a contextual, multi‑layered activity; meaning depends on the field in which an utterance appears. LLMs mimic the form of curiosity but do not possess curiosity as a human quality. Our curiosity, however, drives the conversation and shapes the meaning we extract from the exchange.
My first, simple question to Gemini was: has anyone connected Citizen Kane’s “Rosebud” with Herrick’s famous lines “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may…”? The model answered that while the Herrick link is not the standard textbook reading, scholars and film buffs have certainly drawn parallels. The core idea is straightforward: both Rosebud and Herrick’s rosebud gesture toward youth as fleeting beauty and the tragedy of lost time.
Gemini outlined three helpful points.
1) The carpe diem connection. Herrick’s poem is a canonical carpe diem text. Its opening lines emphasize the urgency of youth before decay. In Citizen Kane, the sled named Rosebud stands for the last instant of innocent childhood before Kane is swept into wealth and power. The symbolic resonance is clear: Rosebud marks what is gone and cannot be reclaimed.
2) Bud versus bloom. Both works emphasize the bud, not the full blossom. In Herrick the bud is potential and implicitly fragile — once it blooms it is already on the road toward decay. In Kane’s life, the sled is a vestige of his bud stage. The film can be read as a life spent trying to possess or recreate that lost potential, only to discover that no amount of acquisition can recover the past.
3) Intentionality and alternatives. Welles and his co‑writer Herman J. Mankiewicz were widely read, so Herrick would likely have been familiar to them. Yet canonical explanations for Rosebud range from the psychological (a simplified Freudian symbol of childhood trauma) to the salacious Hearst rumor (an intimate nickname tied to William Randolph Hearst’s life). Even if the name arose by chance or as a crude joke, Gemini argues, it landed in a cultural field where centuries of association with roses and loss already existed.
From there the model moved to a theoretical framing: T. S. Eliot’s “tradition and the individual talent.” Eliot’s argument is that artists do not work in isolation; they make and remake a historical sense that is both past and present. Gemini suggested that Rosebud’s power partly derives from that historical sense: the sled resonates because audiences unconsciously bring a reservoir of associations — carpe diem poetry, images of youth and decay — to the moment when the sled is revealed and then destroyed.
Gemini sketched a mechanism of “cross‑pollination.” Symbols gain weight through repeated cultural usage; they can be consciously borrowed or unconsciously absorbed. The result: a single image in a film can carry layers of meaning beyond the author’s explicit intention. The sled burning in the furnace becomes more than a prop: it is a cinematic punctuation that signals the literal destruction of an innocence Herrick warned would die.
When the model asked whether decoding Kane through Herrick makes the film more tragic or risks turning a very private loss into a literary abstraction, I pushed back. I argued that linking Welles and Herrick need not diminish the film’s concreteness. Instead, it ties two concrete instances — a poem’s line and a sled moment — and brings additional moral and cultural freight into view without erasing the personal pathos.
That exchange illustrates something important about AI as an educational tool. The model did not supply definitive proof that Welles intended Herrick; it offered a framework, historical context and interpretive moves that helped me refine my own perception. The interaction behaved less like an answer machine and more like a prompt‑giving interlocutor: it suggested lines of thought I might pursue next.
I will publish the full prompt and further parts of this conversation in tomorrow’s column. In the meantime, I welcome readers’ responses. If you have thoughts about the Herrick–Welles connection, Eliot’s theory, the mechanics of cultural symbolism, or how AI can enhance critical thinking, please write to us at [email protected]. We plan to gather and incorporate human perspectives into an ongoing conversation about art and artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence, used well, can be a creative instrument: a way to expose the threads between works, to test hypotheses and to prod us into clearer thinking. It does not replace human judgment or curiosity; it amplifies them when we use it as a partner in inquiry.