In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air, Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves, The deception of the thrush? Into our first world. Quick, said the bird, find them, find them, Point to one end, which is always present.ĭisturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves To see this applied to song lyrics, please checkout my Vampire Weekendįollowing is the full-text of “Four Quartets” with a visualization accompanying each section. Rather than scribble notes on paper, never really seeing the big picture, we can now visually understand the structure of repetition in a given work. This visualization allows us to explore poetry and lyrical verse in a new light. This also explains the persistent diagonal line in all images, each square here show each lines similarly with itself (ie line 1 with line 1, line 23 with line 23 etc), which of course is a 100% match. The lighter the color the more similar the lines. In straightforward terms what you are seeing is a grid where each square visually represents the similarity between any given 2 lines of the poem. What you see here is a “cosine similarity matrix”, the technical details of which are discussed
So I decided to put my nlp experience to work and come up with a way to represent some aspects of this repetition visually For years I’ve thought of manually graphing out these connections but I wondered if there might be another way. My dog-eared copy of the poem from college has many notes pointing out which lines reference which other lines. Both for fun and work I do a fair bit of Natural Language Processing (NLP) work and have been thinking of ways to combine these two interests in my life.Įverytime I read or listen to the “Four Quartets” I’m struck by the complex repetition of themes and verses.
Continuing from that time to the present has been my love of T.S. Long before becoming interested in computer science I was an English major.