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...