Click a stanza below to measure that passage on its own.
Count the syllables and you find the line length the poet was aiming at; the beat is how often the naturally stressed syllables fall where the metre expects them. A line that ends without a stop runs its sense into the next, which is what makes blank verse feel like speech and couplets feel like epigrams.
The scheme is the pattern of rhyme letters in a stanza (ABAB means lines one and three rhyme, and two and four). Below it: the sounds this poet reaches for most, the pairs used again and again, and the pairs that rhymed in the poet's mouth but not in ours.
Alliteration and assonance are measured against a shuffled baseline: the same words in the same lines, in random order. Then where the pauses fall inside the line, and how varied the vocabulary is once length is corrected. Brackets are 95 percent bootstrap intervals over lines. The methods page defines every figure.
"Distinctive" words are the ones this work uses far more than the rest of the library does, which is usually a good guide to its subject and its manner. End words matter more than others because rhyme and rhythm put weight on them.
The share of each part of speech, with the library average marked on every bar. A high noun share makes a poetry of things and pictures; a high verb share, of actions; many adjectives, of description.
The same measure, section by section, for works with more than one part. A rising line means the habit grows through the work; a jagged one means the sections differ in kind.
Type any word that ends a line: how often the poet closes on it, what it rhymes with, where in the work it clusters, and every line it ends.
Every figure on this page can be recomputed from the files.
Method