Tables and graphs about words, oh my!

Good news first: I seem to have found much more evidence than I expected to show that Tennyson was influenced by Old English and old words.  My goal for the five weeks leading up to term was to write 10,000 words, and I'm 80% there with a week to go.  My slight concern is that my paper is filling up with tables, a graph, and calculations of percentages that I fear will bore my reader to tears.  But as requested (thanks, Adelaide!), here is a sampling.

Example #1
Let's show that Tennyson had an ear for the way Old English poetry sounded.  OE poetry had four stressed beats in a line.  The words that fell on these stresses alliterated (started with the same sound) in a certain pattern: the same sound in stress #1 or #2 (or both), plus stress #3.  And oh yeah, all vowels alliterate with each other.  Tennyson also liked four-stress lines, conveniently enough.  Here are some examples within the poem "Mariana" where he follows the old pattern:

	Stressed syllable
	1	2	3	4
Either at morn or eventide (16)	X		X
After the flitting of the bats (17)	X		X
She drew her casement-curtain by (19)		X	X
And glanced athwart the glooming flats (20)	X		X
The cock sung out an hour ere light (27)		X	X
The clustered marish-mosses crept (40)		X	X
All day within the dreamy house (61)	X		X
Which to the wooing wind aloof (75)		X	X

After that I talk about close-but-no-cigar lines that sound about the same to an amateur (i.e. Tennyson) but actually break the rules by including the fourth stress...

Example #2
It's a graph!  Heavens to Betsy.  "The Lotos-Eaters" is a fabulous poem that riffs on part of the Odyssey.  Go read it!  I'll wait. ...  I'm exploring the fact that a surprisingly high percentage of the poem's vocabulary is Germanic or Norse, not French/Latin.  In fact, it only averages 1-2 Romance words per line, with some sections having none at all.  How do I know this?  Because I counted.  I checked every word with the OED and made a pretty ugly graph.  In case it's not clear, the numbers on the y-axis are the lines of the poem.

As I was discussing this process with a friend, it became clear that someone with more linguistics and computer skills could probably make a project out of doing this kind of analysis on Tennyson's entire corpus (all 1,800 pages of it).  But it ain't gonna be me.

So there you have it, a humanities gal getting her hands dirty with organized information.  Really it's just a product of the fact that I find it much easier to grasp patterns when I see them visually displayed like this.  I read the rules for Old English alliteration many times, but as soon as I drew it out, it clicked.  Plus, I really didn't want to have pages and pages of text along the lines of, "And here's another example of where he does this."  I hope my supervisor finds it useful, too.

Meanwhile, I'm preparing to get rowing started again next week.  I got on an erg (rowing machine) last night for the first time in weeks, and it wasn't promising.  :P  I'm looking forward to getting on the water, but it looks like I will have to switch sides for now, and I know that will both feel weird and reduce my quality of rowing since I haven't done it much.  But to cheer myself up I watch this video of four of us at a regatta in August.  I'm sitting on the far right, nearest the cox.  We reconfigured the boat so that I could sit in that position and set the pace for everyone -- which made me nervous, but was kind of fun in the end.  Forgive the weird deformations as YouTube tries to eliminate camera movement...

Monastic life (mostly)

With the hustle and bustle of Olympics over -- at least the Olympics for which I had tickets -- I have no choice but to return to the library.  But don't feel too sorry for me.  At this point, even most of the grads and summer-research undergrads who were around for the summer have gone home, either because they finished their master's dissertations or just for a visit home.  This means I live a sort of monastic life of semi-solitude.  My day generally looks something like this:

9:30 -- Either just getting up or going sculling with a friend

11:30 -- Settle into my study nest in the Tit Hall library, write a little

1:00pm -- Lunch in the MCR or the lawn

2:00-5:00pm -- Write on my latest chapter until I reach 500 words

5:00 -- Coach people on rowing

6:30 -- Dinner in the MCR

7:00 -- Read

That looks very impressive and studious, but keep a couple things in mind: 1) I waste a lot of time doing other things (blargh, internet); 2) when term starts, I will have very little time for work thanks to being a rowing captain.  So I have to get stuff done now.

Pre-play entertainment at the Globe

But there have been some fun distractions.  One was a trip to the Globe Theatre in London -- you know, the one where Shakespeare worked.  Obviously it's a reconstruction, but I'm not complaining.  I was a "groundling," standing in front of the stage, under the open sky as it faded from blue to dusky purple.  The guy who played Henry V was fantastic, and they even managed to make the wooing scene believable, which I didn't think was possible.

Another diversion was a few days at a retreat/conference on "Life Beyond the PhD."  The English faculty had a bunch of money to send people and were practically flinging it at us, so I joined some thirteen compatriots and a load from other universities at the gorgeous Cumberland Lodge.  Honestly, I was most excited about spending a few days in a swanky country house, and it did not disappoint.  To the left is a picture of part of my room.  Best of all, the bathroom had an actual bath in it!  I used it every night.  :)

My room at Cumberland Lodge

On a walk in Windsor Great Park

Of course, there were also many opportunities to meet other PhD students from around the country, doing many different topics -- in fact, one whole day consisted of giving 10-minute presentations on our research.  It was a friendly crowd, and I even got to know some other Cantabrigians better when we took a long walk one afternoon.  The lodge is in the same park as Windsor Castle, so when the sun peeped out between gusts of chilly wind, it was a lovely place to stroll around.

Now that I'm back in the library, I'm pressing on through the molasses of taking my theories about philology's influence on Tennyson and showing them in his most famous poems.  At the moment, that means looking up every word of "The Lotos-Eaters" in the online Oxford English Dictionary to see what proportion of words he used were of Germanic vs. French/Latin origin.  I may even make a graph before I'm done -- how strange for an arts student!