I'm talking in pentameter again

[simont]

Way back in 1999, the_alchemist persuaded me to read ‘Paradise Lost’. For a while afterwards I found myself thinking in iambic pentameter; Milton's poetry warped my brain into a rigid column ten syllables wide. I got over that after a while, but since then I've had something of a fascination with sentences in normal speech which just happen to come out in perfect iambic pentameter. I always notice them when they go past; I point them out (and irritate my friends). I naturally speak them quite a lot; I've always wondered what this fact portends.

Just now I had a fit of silliness. I wrote a short program to go through a piece of text and pick out all the sentences it thinks are in iambic pentameter. Then I ran it over the entire archive of my various online diaries, to see what it would find.

It doesn't function quite reliably. It uses a pronunciation database I downloaded to tell it the stress patterns in each word, but without a lot more intelligence it won't ever be able to determine the inter-word stress pattern given by the sentence's overall meaning. So the output needs filtering by a human, to get rid of junk like ‘I do hope it gets its act in gear soon’. However, about 50% of its output turned out to be plausible, which I thought was pretty good for a first attempt.

It turned up a number of sentences which made surprising sense out of context and were pleasingly poetic as stand-alone iambic pentameters:

Another day; another interview.
I wonder if it's something in the air.
I have a microwave and no food yet.
At least there are no known bugs any more.
Intense peeve of the day: the Halifax.
Excuse me while I go and kill some things.
I've had a victory at work this week.
The port had cleverly run out, you see.
Suppose I'd better go and do that, then.
Well, that's most of the chaos sorted out.
And then it goes completely off the rails.

As you can probably tell from the above, frustratingly few of the sentences I turned up rhymed with one another, but just enough did for me to be able to put together this almost coherent piece:

Hello out there and welcome to the show!
For starters, getting here was half the fun.
Another interview has taken place.
But probably a fairly normal one.

I oscillate between two states of mind.
I've learned to canter, mostly by mistake.
That's the whole kitchen up and running now.
Last Saturday, I baked a ginger cake.

She tells me they were selling gothic rock.
I wonder why it didn't just say so.
It never happened and it ain't so hard.
Shame it had milk in it, but there we go.

I might not even get it back today.
I shall be happy when it's gone away.

Comments

[atreic.livejournal.com]

This is a beautiful post :-)

(but I think the stess is on peeve, not of, in the Halifax line.)

I'm having great fun at the moment reading Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled. I'd recommend it (although as I'm only up to chaper 3 I can't recomment very much of it yet)

[simont]

I think shifting the stress is allowable in some situations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iambic_pentameter#Rhythmic_variation :-P

But thank you :-)

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

What a fantastic post! I am currently listening to something by Kate Bush that's almost in iambic pentameter, and it made a rather good match!

[fanf]

I've always wondered what this fact portends.

You've got me spotting them now.

[simont]

Aha, I wondered if anyone would notice that I filled this particular post with them for fun. There are a few more in there too :-)

[j4.livejournal.com]

I naturally speak them quite a lot; I've always wondered what this fact portends.

Iambic pentameter is generally acknowledged to be the type of poetic metre which is closest to normal English speech patterns...

Sorry if you were hoping it meant you were a reincarnation of Hamlet! ;-)

[simont]

I'm sure there's an LJ meme somewhere which will be happy to tell me whether I'm a reincarnation of Hamlet, Prospero, the Porter or the Second Murderer :-)