In the style of Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann's deformations of poems, I've did something similar with the first invocation from Paradise Lost.
The original can be found here. Here is a deformation of the invocation showing only the nouns:
Mans Disobedience Fruit
Tree tast
Death World woe
loss Eden Man
us Seat
Muse top
Oreb Sinai
Shepherd Seed
Beginning Heav’ns Earth
Chaos Hill
thee Brook
Oracle God I
aid Song
flight
Mount it
Things Prose Rhime
Thou Spirit
Temples heart
me thou thou
wings
Abyss
it me
what
highth Argument,
I Providence,
wayes God men
Interesting about this image is its looped or spiral-like structure. It's as though one now has to read circularly or around the curvatures that the words create. So you might be reading clockwise in the upper loop, starting at "Mans," going to "Fruit," then through "Hill," around "God" and "Oracle," and back up to "Tree." Or you could read counter-clockwise, starting at "Fruit" or "Man" and ending a "tast." Alternatively, you could see the upper part of the deformed work as having two columns, where "Mans Disobedience" forms the top of the first column and "Fruit" forms the second.
Perhaps the most compelling detail one can find here is how the word "flight" forms the focal point, or the center, of the double-looped structure of the invocation. In the first loop we see nouns that denote places or positions (Tree, world, seat, top, Oreb, Sinai, Brook). "Flight's" central position in the double-loop helps to signal a change in direction-- a flight-like departure from the fixation on place and towards a deeper investment in articulating the "Argument," "Providence," and God's "wayes" to "men." It's this word "flight" which begins the second loop that focuses on the epic justification of providence.
And here's a deformation that shows only the verbs of the first invocation:
Brought
Restore regain
Sing
didst inspire
taught
Rose
Delight flowed
Invoke
intends
pursues
dost prefer
Instruct know'st
Wast
sat'st brooding
mad'st is
Illumin is raise support
may assert
justifie
We quickly notice the "D-like" structure. There's a straight vertical column with a curvature on the right. What we observe is that as both the vertical column and the curve wind downward, they reach a clustering of closely packed verbs (sat'st brooding, mad'st, is, Illumin, is, raise, support, may assert, justifie). Perhaps this clustering accentuates the narrator's urgent desire to articulate the justification.
Lastly, here's a Voyant ScatterPlot-generated Correspondence Analysis of the first invocation:
We see now a triangular outline of the invocation. You'll notice that some of the words on this image are blurred. The likely reason for this is because certain words have the same frequency and so these words overlap and blur each other. The spatialization that emerges is the result of statistical calculations. Words are spaced according to their frequencies in relation to the average frequency, which is 0 in this plot. So the word that is closest to the average of 0 is "and." Instead, of "flight" as the focal point of the first example of deformation, the conjunction "and" surfaces as the average, norm, and center.
Comments (2)
Corrigan said
at 10:21 am on Nov 26, 2013
A) The noun deformation is totally rad looking. Like some sort of tornado hourglass.
B) I like that the verbs look like a pregnant belly. (That's my New England hippie side coming out)
Phillip Cortes said
at 11:20 am on Nov 26, 2013
That's a great observation about the verb deformation looking like a pregnant belly, since in the original the narrator says," Thou [Spirit] from the first / Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread / Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss/ And mad'st it pregnant." So one could argue the verb deformation echoes that sense of pregnancy, or that the clustering of verbs in bottom part of the "D-shaped" image represents a womb-like shape pregnant with the narrator's desire to justify providence.
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