Demystifying Poetic Meter | Hacker News Reader

Demystifying Poetic Meter

theparisreview.org

85 pointsapollinaire36 comments

Anyone who finds this interesting might enjoy playing around with the meter analysis feature of my side project poetry text editor: https://versepad.com

(The meter analysis is the most complex part of the codebase, but that doesn't mean it's perfect. If you find a case that it's not handling well, please let me know so I can improve it!)

Fair warning: this project is very rough around the edges. But I'll be releasing some big improvements in the near future.

Pretty cool. Evergreen workshop debates about stress and meter were one of the things that drew me back to programming while I was pursuing my MFA years ago. Care to share what dataset you're using to identify meter?

The rhyme scheme feature is throwing an error in the console. And I initially had some trouble with the Show Meter feature on Firefox but it's working on Chrome. Neat!

When you've polished this up a little and worked out the kinks, I'd recommend sharing it on Show HN.

Thanks for the feedback! I really appreciate your input.

The console error I'm aware of (assuming the error you're seeing is `newTree should be an object`); it doesn't seem to be actually breaking anything (as far as I can tell?), so I've just been planning to fix it when I release some other improvements over the coming days. Thanks for the tip on Firefox—will take a look and see what's going on there!

And to your question about the meter dataset, it's mostly using the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary: http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict

Yes, that was the error.

I tried it again with Firefox and it worked. It was just slow. Maybe a UI doodad to indicate it's processing.

Thanks for sharing the cmudict. Yes, I think that was the one I downloaded back when I was tinkering in this domain. Discovering the various English language datasets was one of those things that made me say, "Hey, the internet is pretty cool!"

Agreed! And thanks for the tip—a UI spinner of some sort would definitely be helpful.

Hey this is cool! I tried Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 and it thinks only half the lines have the correct meter---which partly goes to show how flexible real poems can be but also could highlight places your tool could be refined. I think line 1 ends in a spondee. Also in sonnets starting a line with trochee-iamb is so common you might want to accept that as metrical too. Does it use punctuation as hints? In line 6 the comma at "Featured like him," seems important to the rythym.

For the ultimate challenge you should see if you can make any sense of Hopkins. :-)

When I was in Classics grad school I started a metrical search engine project. The idea was to give scholars a search box with a regex-like syntax for finding lines in a corpus matching metrical features. For example you could find all the lines in Homer with feminine endings. With Perseus it's easy to get lots of Greek & Latin texts. Then you just have to scan everything, but you can program that. I had an on-paper program to do dactylic hexameter. If anyone else thinks that might be a helpful tool, let me know. (Also if you work for Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and want to hire me to write this thing, I can make availability! ;-)

Wow, your search engine project sounds really neat! What a cool idea.

Thanks for the tips re: Shakespeare and Hopkins. I'll definitely dig in there. One of the tricky things with poets like Shakespeare is that many of his sonnets' lines I personally wouldn't consider to be iambic pentameter. Take the first line of Sonnet 29 for example: if I were reading that without affectation I'd put emphasis on "When" and "men's," while iambic requires that those be unstressed.

I don't know if speech patterns were different enough in Shakespeare's day that it sounded more natural with different stresses than we'd use today, but if I were evaluating that poem blind and didn't know it was Shakespeare I'd give it low marks for requiring a relatively forced inflection. Just my opinion, though!

I was an English major in college, so maybe I'm taking some background for granted here: no one expected that good poetry had 5x14 da-DUMs without relief. (Certainly you wouldn't want to force Shakespeare to sound that way when you read it aloud.) But the most common variations were well-known and tended to feel right, letting the poet vary things enough to avoid sing-songiness but still not stand out as wrong. So a trochee in the first foot is very common. Same with a spondee in the last foot. Other feet can flip to become trochees too, but people have pointed out that it is more common in some feet than others. For example (IIRC but it's been a long time) I don't think the fourth foot flips very often, because it's hard to make it not sound bad. But those changes are "allowed" and so "it's still iambic pentameter." So it'd be cool if your algorithms could acknowledge those deviations, e.g. maybe give the line a purple-and-white shading instead of just white, or an asterisk.

EDIT: A quick Google turned up this article that has a lot of the patterns I remember: https://versemeter.wordpress.com/2016/09/20/iambic-pentamete...

Wow, your comment plus that link is a treasure trove of information! I have very little formal poetry education so I really appreciate your insight here. I'd love to make Versepad smart enough to handle these variations (similar to how it currently handles catalexis, for example). Thanks!

One of my own favorite explanations of meter in English is Timothy Steele's All the Fun's in How you Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification [0].

I'd be interested if anyone has other recommendations?

[0]: https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/All+the+Fun%E2%80%99s+in+Ho...

This thread take me back.

> but people have pointed out that it is more common in some feet than others

You might enjoy this: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.149...

And the follow-up, a longer examination of iambic pentameter: http://linguistica.sns.it/RdL/9.1/Hanson.pdf

Thank you for this, it looks great! I cannot wait for the improvements! :)

By the way, is the text entered sent to any servers? Not that it matters to me much when it comes to poems, but as someone who cares about privacy, I have to ask. :D

Regardless, this looks awesome and useful!

Hey, thanks for the kind words. I hadn't really planned to share this project today, which is why there's no mention of privacy on the site.

To answer your question: all of the "computation" is done client-side, but depending on which features you use, the client might ask the server for data at a word level (like "give me all the rhymes of 'trust'" or "how many syllables are in 'privacy'"), so I guess in a sense your text can be sent to the servers, but never in an aggregated way.

Also, as someone who also cares about privacy, I can tell you:

- I don't keep any server logs - The only tracking I do (to get traffic numbers) is self-hosted and uses Fathom[1] (which respects privacy in a variety of ways) - I jump through a fair number of hoops to prevent the other third-party tools (Bugsnag[2] and Appzi[3]) from collecting personally identifiable information

While the details of the above might change at some point (I may eventually add some basic server logging, for example), the spirit will not. I don't want to collect any data that I don't absolutely need.

Hope that's helpful!

[1]: https://usefathom.com [2]: https://www.bugsnag.com [3]: https://www.appzi.com

Thank you for the answer! Yes, it was helpful. :) Keep up the good work and thank you again for sharing!

Wow, this is great! I wanted to make an assistant like this out of my own meter/rhyme code, but was too lazy.

(Said code is at https://github.com/darius/languagetoys if anyone wants some hacky old open source. The biggest lacuna is that it gives up on unknown words.)

Hah cool that so many people have been working on this. I had the same "original" idea and put some hours during the summer into my implementation of an editor to help me write metered poetry. But anyway, it's a damn huge job to code the actual logic to calculate the meters robustly so I never feel like working on it.

Wow, haha very cool that we're all trying to scratch the same itch!

Pretty cool, though when I tried pasting in a Shakespeare sonnet, it didn't think he'd done a very good job. ;)

Also, I was sad that "Limerick" wasn't among the forms it knows.

Thanks for checking it out! Limericks are actually a surprisingly ill-defined form, but I'll be adding what I consider an "80% correct" limerick feature soonish.

And yeah, I mentioned Shakespeare in this other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21093024

Who'da thought that analyzing art objectively would be hard?

Iambic pentameter never made any sense to me when I was in high school English, or really at any time since. My brain locks up trying to figure out what in the hell the difference actually is between the syllables in an iamb. It's probably not helpful that the dialect of English that I grew up with had some very parochial regional quirks, and most of the material that was trotted out as examples came from Elizabethan English, which would be somewhat incomprehensible spoken to most people today anyway. Long/short, stressed/unstressed, accented/unaccented, none of these descriptions illuminates much, at least for me.

When I had to write some sonnets in pentameter, I had to find some web pages that diagrammed out what the "proper" structure of words was, so I could pick out synonyms that might work...

I think your experience is common. I never had any trouble "hearing" meter in poetry (though I'm completely oblivious to time signatures in music, which feels like it ought to be very closely related) but know plenty of people who do.

One other practical impact of this is trying to learn languages like Chinese where a stressed versus unstressed syllable is very often the difference between two completely unrelated words.

>* I'm completely oblivious to time signatures in music,*

You sure can tell a waltz (3/4) from a house track (4/4, usually solid 4 on the floor)

To understand the difference between stressed and unstressed, it may be useful to consider versions of words which differ only in their stress pattern, of which we have a few. Record, the verb, as in "I'll record the show", is two syllables, unstressed-stressed. Record, the noun, as in "Hey, wanna listen to my new record?" is stressed-unstressed. Ditto address the verb vs. address the noun (at least in American English). In fact, we have a whole family of these words with two versions, mostly french-derived bisyllables, known as initial-stress-derived nouns[0].

Most words of more than one syllable have one primary stress. (Sometimes longer ones have a second, weaker stress, too.) In words of more than one syllable, the stress more often than not falls on the second syllable, though this is far from universal.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial-stress-derived_noun

I feel your pain! I think a big part of the problem is that most of the iambic pentameter examples taught in school are actually not iambic pentameter (at least not with modern-day speech patterns). I expanded on this more in another comment, but I find it much easier to think about meter when not trying to fit Shakespeare into it.

The best (short) explanation I can think of is: if you were to read the line like you were saying it in normal, fairly fast speech, which syllables would have ever so slightly more oomph ? For example, the sentence "I want to go to the museum." to me sounds most natural as:

  i WANT to GO to the muSEum

then for iambic you just see if that follows a pattern of unstressed/stressed (it doesn't here). An example that is iambic would be: "You'd rather eat than see the show?"

  you'd RAther EAT than SEE the SHOW

Hope that's more helpful than hurtful! :)

I'm pretty sure you were just trying to showcase the stresses, but your last example is in iambic tetrameter, not pentameter. Which is another frequent source of confusion.

For some reason, the fact that "penta" stands for "five" (like the Pentagon!) seems to get lost in a lot of these discussions. They must be teaching poetry these days without explaining the Greek/Latin origin of the terms they use.

Word roots are fascinating. Epics were written in dactylic hexameter. Dactyls mean fingers. You know, as in pterodactyls. They're called pterodactyls because their wings (ptero-) were supported by their long fingers. A dactyl has three syllables, DA-da-da, just like the sections of your fingers.

Yes, sorry! I was trying to just discuss the "iambic" part and ignore the "pentameter," which I'd assumed (maybe incorrectly) was not the source of confusion. Thanks for the clarification.

A fantastic resource on this is "The Ode Less Travelled" by Stephen Fry. He is very thorough on meter and rhyme schemes, and makes a compelling case for more people to write and read poetry.

The author digresses in to casual misandry for no apparent reason fairly early in the piece.

It’s a distraction from an otherwise interesting piece.

I memorized this poem in high school and I refer to it whenever I need to remember the name of a meter: https://www.bartleby.com/360/9/155.html

For a nice overview of the prosody that underlies poetic meter, music, and most other forms of speech, I recommend this[1] video by Kyle Kallgren, which includes a lot of practical examples from the Beatles and other well-known works.

[1] https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x46rxnz

How do I learn more about the techniques involved in poetry? Any classics or great books anyone can recommend?

I would recommend getting a good anthology like Palgrave's or the Arthur Quiller-Couch, or for Americans Robert Penn Warren and working through them.

Thank you so much, I didn't know about those.

There's another good article on HN today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21085940

It's a less concrete essay about the technical specifics, but it communicates a lot about how poets think about their word choices. (Ignore the confusing title.)

Take a look at Judson Jerome's The Poet's Handbook. Very readable introduction to English prosody, as well as a variety of other technical aspects of poetry.

I'd second the other commenter's suggestion of an anthology. For a comprehensive anthology with a terrific reference section where you can learn the "technical details" of poetry, I'd recommend The Norton Anthology of Poetry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com