As long-term readers of my blog will know, one of my projects is an in-depth study of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18.” I’ve also been interested in Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” While thinking about it recently, I realized how few polysyllabic words it had. Always ready to formulaize something if I can, I soon came up with a (possibly) new characteristic of poems, semantic density. It is equal to the number of syllables in a poem divided into the number of words in the poem. It turns out the Frost poem’s semantic density is .86, Shakespeare’s about the same. I suspect few other poems have as high a semantic density, but I haven’t investigated the matter.
. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
. Whose woods these are I think I know.
. His house is in the village though;
. He will not see me stopping here
. To watch his woods fill up with snow.
. My little horse must think it queer
. To stop without a farmhouse near
. Between the woods and frozen lake
. The darkest evening of the year.
. He gives his harness bells a shake
. To ask if there is some mistake.
. The only other sound’s the sweep
. Of easy wind and downy flake.
. The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
. But I have promises to keep,
. And miles to go before I sleep,
. And miles to go before I sleep.
Technically speaking, there are seventeen polysyllabic words in this poem, one of them three syllables in length, all the others just two in length. I do not count “farmhouse” as a single word, though, since each of its two syllables has a clear separate meaning, “farm” really being an adjective pushed into a noun, “house.” And I count “”sound’s” as two words, because it is: “sound” plus “is.” Yet is is only one syllable in length. So, to get the semantic density of the poem, we divide 110, not 109, by 128
Once become mathematically irreverent toward about the ratio of words in a poem to its syllables, I thought of other density ratios applicable to poems: e.g., euphonic density or the ratio of euphonies (long-o‘s, long-u‘s and “ah”-sounds) to number of syllables in a poem, repenemic density (repenemes to syllables, a repeneme being a repeated melodation such as alliterationor rhyme, the latter counting as two repenemes) and–this one I especially like–oddword density. This would be the ratio of unusual words to syllable-count, with “unusual” being what a word is that comes up only a certain low number of times in s large sample of contemporary writing.
The euphonic denisty of Frost’s poem is just under .20. I’d be surprised if many other poems have a euphonic denisty that high. I’ll check Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18″ tomorrow.
Tags: Poetics, Robert Frost, William Shakespeare