I have worked as a blood technician and medical researcher since 1967 in South Africa, where, according to one study based in the Gauteng province, 1 in 4 women have been raped in their lifetime. Crime statistics released by the South African Police Service in 2013 suggest that rape is grossly underreported. For decades, I have witnessed the reality of these grim statistics first-hand while treating survivors of this unspeakable act.
While the incidence of rape is extremely high in South Africa, it is not an exception. Somewhere in the United States of America a woman is raped every 98 seconds. The United Nations recognizes that sexual violence is a severely underreported crime and that similar statistics can be found globally. As rape statistics climb to staggering rates and victims continue to be overlooked by justice systems around the world, a radical response to sexual violence is needed.
It was a patient who prompted me to pursue such a response early in my career. Late one night in 1969, I was tending to a woman who had just survived an attack when she left me with words I would never forget.
Shaking in terror with tears running down her face, she said:
“If only I had teeth down there.”
I pledged to her that one day, I would do something to help others in her situation. Now several decades later, I intend to fulfill this promise by transforming her idea into a device designed to give women a stronger chance at escaping sexual assault and bring their attackers to justice.
Shakespeare’s sonnets are carefully measured, each line having ten syllables, a total of fourteen lines and concluding with a couplet at the end. The one concerns an anguished lover’s separation from the object of his affection during the spring, thereby removing his enjoyment of the season of growth and warmer days.
Source: Poem Hunter
Shakespeare’s sonnets are often bitter sweet, describing the contradictions, heartbreak and loss of romantic love. The author is rarely happy.
From you have I been absent in the spring, When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim, Hath put a spirit of youth in everything, That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him. Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell Of different flowers in odour and in hue, Could make me any summer’s story tell, Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew: Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white, Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose; They were but sweet, but figures of delight Drawn after you, – you pattern of all those. Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away, As with your shadow I with these did play.
Sonnet 98
From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trim
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odor and in hue
Could make me any summer's story tell.
Or from their proud lap pluck them while they grew;
Nor did I wonder at the lily's white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight;
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seem'd it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play.
William Shakespeare
Sonnet 98 by William Shakespeare is a poignant exploration of love, absence, and the enduring impact of a beloved's presence. Composed during the Renaissance, a period marked by a fascination with love poetry and the complexities of human emotions, this sonnet encapsulates the timeless themes that resonate across generations. The Shakespearean sonnet form, characterized by its distinct rhyme scheme and fourteen lines, provides a structured canvas for the poet to weave a narrative of emotional depth. In examining the intricate web of seasonal imagery, personification, and extended metaphor within Sonnet 98, we gain insight into the nuances of Shakespeare's portrayal of love and its profound influence on perception.
Seasonal imagery : "From you have I been absent in the spring,"
The speaker explicitly mentions the absence during spring, setting the seasonal context for the rest of the poem.
Personification : "When proud pied April, dressed in all his trim,"
The personification of April, dressing itself in vibrant colors, adds a lively and spirited quality to the season.
Mythological Allusion : "Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing, / That heavy Saturn laughed and leapt with him." The allusion to Saturn laughing and leaping with April signifies a temporary reprieve from the usual melancholy associated with Saturn, highlighting the transformative power of spring.
Nature's Beauty : "Nor did I wonder at the lily's white, / Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;"
The speaker acknowledges the beauty of nature but indicates a lack of wonder or appreciation, emphasizing the overshadowing effect of the absent person.
Floral Imagery : "They were but sweet, but figures of delight, / Drawn after you, you pattern of all those."
Flowers are acknowledged as sweet but are considered mere representations of the absent person, suggesting their unique beauty.
Extended Metaphor : "Yet seemed it winter still, and you away,"
The extended metaphor comparing the absence to winter conveys a lingering sense of cold and emptiness despite the vibrant spring surroundings.
Final Couplet
"Yet seemed it winter still, and you away,"
The chosen concluding line reinforces the central theme, emphasizing the lingering wintry feeling in the absence of the beloved during the vibrant season of spring.
"As with your shadow I with these did play."
The concluding lines emphasize the enduring impact of the absent person's shadow, even in the midst of the lively imagery associated with spring.
The first quatrain opens with the object pronoun “you”, rather than the subject pronoun “I”, so it is clear who is important to the speaker. This unusual syntax is an example of anastrophe. The Bard begins by telling the boy that, because the two are apart, he has been unable to enjoy spring. The beautiful days are tainted by the presence of the “heavy”, gloomy god, Saturn, — or Cronus in the Greek pantheon — who accompanied and spoilt April by having played and “leapt” with him.
Note that in line two April is described as “proud pied”, pied meaning vari-coloured. The alliterative “p"s and the long vowels emphasise the importance of this point.
The speaker explains that even the beauty of the flowers, with their colours and smells, couldn’t persuade him to take part in the pleasures of the season. Or as he says, “make me any summer’s story tell”.The flowers are personified as having a “proud lap”, from which the blooms could be picked if the speaker had the inclination.
The third quatrain continues with the Bard telling the Fair Youth that in past years he might have enjoyed the whiteness of the lily and the “deep vermillion of the rose. The whiteness symbolises purity and the vermillion passion.The beauty of the flowers has one source, the boy. Therefore, they are “figures of delight /Drawn after you”, and this fact distracts the speaker from the pleasure they could otherwise have brought.
There is a neat balance in the construction of lines nine and ten, both beginning with “Nor” and with similar syntax.The quatrain ends with a volta or “turn”, leading to a new thought.
The last two lines of the quatrain reinforce what has been said by explaining that nature draws its own beauty from the loveliness of the boy. For the speaker the absence of his lover makes the season winter. When he looks all he sees is “your shadow” — the beauty of the Fair Youth.
In Sonnet 98, Shakespeare utilizes the distinctive features of the Shakespearean sonnet to craft a nuanced exploration of love's impact on the human experience. The interplay of seasonal imagery, personification, and the structured rhyme scheme contributes to the enduring resonance of the poem. As the sonnet elegantly unfolds, it invites readers to reflect on the profound connection between love, nature, and the complexities of human emotion, showcasing Shakespeare's mastery in capturing the essence of the human condition.
Version of the Morpheus morphological analyzer. The macronization is performed using a part-of-speech taggerĭependency Treebank, and with macrons provided by a customized The expected accuracy on an average classical text isĮstimated to be about 98% to 99%. This automatic macronizer lets you quickly mark all the long vowels Maintenance and continuous development! Any amount is very much Time-saving, please consider making a donation, to support If you use the macronizer regularly and find it helpful and When tested on a couple of books of theĪeneid (from the eminent Dickinson CollegeĬommentaries), this has been demonstrated to cut the number ofĮrroneous vowel lengths in half! Currently, dactylic hexametersĪnd elegiac distichs are supported other meters may be added.Īlso, I have now added a PayPal donation button: July 2016: I am happy to announce that the Macronizer now isĪble to take the meter into account when guessing the vowel October 2016: The performance on texts written in all uppercase letters has been greatly improved. May 2017: I have now made the macronized text editable, which means that it will now be much easier to correct typos or misspellings while proofreading the text. Ĭompare result with correctly macronized input text.Īugust 2017: More meters added! The macronizer can now handle hendecasyllables as well as distichs of iambic trimeters and dimeters ( Beātus ille quī procul negōtiīs.). To improve the result, try to scan the text as. Through these devices our goal is to reach a wider audience and engage people to reconnect with poetry.Note: In order to avoid time out from the server, input longer than 50000 characters will be truncated.
#SCANSION GENERATOR PORTABLE#
and a “poetry box” (la boîte à poésie), a portable version of the original idea that can be demonstrated in public events (based on Raspberry Pi components).
#SCANSION GENERATOR GENERATOR#
The generator uses this analysis to produce random sonnets, with different possible structures, respecting the rules of French versification (the code and the resources used, especially the sonnet database, are open source and freely available for research).Ī series of “side products” have been produced from the project, including: In order to do this, the first step is to get a phonetic transcription of the last word of each verse, but this is not enough : a series of rules had thus to be defined to get a proper analysis of rhyme from the phonetic transcription of the last word of each verse. The project requires to get access to a formal representation of rhymes. Each sonnet is encoded in a XML format along with related metadata, and a TEI version of the database is available. Oupoco is currently based on a collection of around 4000 sonnets from a large number of authors from the 19 th century, and this database is regularly expanding (thanks to collaboration, especially with the Bibliothèque nationale de France). It is thus very different from the numerous projects dedicated to the pure generation of poetry, being with symbolic or neural methods. From this point of view, even if the project is intended to generate new sonnets, it is largely based on the development of analysis tools able to identify the scansion, the rhyme and the structure of the original sonnets. The challenge is thus more complex than the one proposed originally by Queneau since our sonnets do not have the same scansion and rhyme. To overcome this problem, we developed the Oupoco project, aiming at proposing a sonnet generator based on the recombination of a large collection of 19th century French sonnets. It would be tempting to develop a computer-based version of Queneau’s work, but Queneau’s book is still under copyright, and it is by definition limited to its ten original sonnets. Queneau’s book is a collection of ten sonnets which verses can be freely recombined to form new poems. Oupoco (L’ouvroir de poésie combinatoire) is a project taking inspiration from RaymondQueneau's book Cent mille mille milliards de poèmes, published in 1961.
Son of the old Moon-mountains African!
Chief of the Pyramid and Crocodile!
We call thee fruitful, and that very while
A desert fills our seeing’s inward span:
Nurse of swart nations since the world began,
Art thou so fruitful? or dost thou beguile
Such men to honour thee, who, worn with toil,
Rest for a space ‘twixt Cairo and Decan?
O may dark fancies err! They surely do;
‘Tis ignorance that makes a barren waste
Of all beyond itself. Thou dost bedew
Green rushes like our rivers, and dost taste
The pleasant sunrise. Green isles hast thou too,
And to the sea as happily dost haste.
“The Wednesday before last, Shelley, Hunt and I, wrote each a sonnet on the river Nile: some day you shall read them all.” – Life, Letters &c., 1848, Volume 1, page 98