Entry 74 — Poetic Densities, Continued
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. Sonnet 18
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. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
. Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May
. And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
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. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines
. And often is his gold complexion dimmed.
. And every fair from fair sometime declines
. By chance or Nature’s changing course untrimmed.
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. But thy eternal summer shall not fade
. Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st.
. Nor shall Death brag thou wandr’st in his shade
. When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.
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. So long as men have breath and eyes to see,
. So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
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Shakespeare, 140 syllables, 116 words (because I count “sometime’ as two words) to give a semantic density of .83. That’s lower than I estimated yesterday because when I forgot that not all its words of more than one syllable had only one more than one. So Frost’s poem is quite a bit higher than Shakespeare’s.
The sonnet has a surprisingly low euphonic density: .09. It makes up for that in repenemic density. I have the figures somewhere to measure that with but am not up to finding them just now.