Introduction

Owen's later poems are known for their experimentation with para-rhyme (where the consonants are the same or very similar but the vowels are not). Although he was not the first poet to use this device, he is often cited as the first to make sustained use of it. One example is using the word "silent" to rhyme with "salient". If you wanted to look at this, you could search for and examine all instances of silent and see if you can find salient near it. An easier way is to search for the co-occurrence, which you can do easily in the Context tool.

Try it!

Go to https://voyant-tools.org/?view=Contexts to find the Voyant Tools 'Context'. Add the Owen texts and press ‘Reveal’. When the Contexts result is shown, go to the search box (bottom left), type the following string :“silent salient”~20 and press enter (include the double quotes as shown and only include a space between the search words). This will search for all instances of silent co-occurring with salient within 20 words. Look at the example that is found. You can increase the number of words you see in each line by using the ‘context’ slider next to the search box. Double-click on the line to see more text (use the ‘expand’ slider to change the number of words shown).

Büchman in 'Harmony and Disharmony: Sound Effects in Owen's Poetry' (in Büchman, 1979, pp. 146-67) lists the following examples of 'inexact rhymes':
silence - nonchalance guns - orisons knive us - nervous

Use the Context tools to find them, following the steps outlined above. If you cannot find anything within 20 words, try changing the search context to 30 words.

Collocations - introduction

Words take on different meanings depending on what other words they are used with, so it is useful to be able to look at how a poet combines words. If you are looking at how two specific words are used together, you can use the Context tool, like we did in the para-rhythm example. If you do not have a specific word pair in mind, but want to find interesting combinations, you can look for ‘collocations’. Collocations are combinations of words that are frequently found close to each other. The words that make up the collocation are called ‘collocates’. ‘Corpus Collocates’ is a Voyant tool that you can use to generate collocations.

Collocations - Try it!

Open the Corpus Collocates page (https://voyant-tools.org/?view=CorpusCollocates) and add the Owen poems like you’ve done before. Press ‘Reveal’ to see a table listing the collocations. The table will show a word (‘term’ in the table) and then a collocate, followed by the number of times these two words appear near each other. Explore the table. You will see that in Owen’s poetry, the term and collocate are sometimes the same, for example love and love. What does that mean? What does this tell you about Owen’s writing? The initial collocation display will show the most frequent collocations in the body of text you are exploring. You can use the search box (bottom left) to retrieve the collocations with a particular word instead. Try this with ‘love’, ‘shall’, ‘men’, or other words that you are interested in.

The tool looks at a certain number of words on either side of the search term. You can change this by using the ‘context’ slider at the bottom of the window. If you make the context larger, you will find words that may be used together in the same text but not necessarily close to each other. That can be useful if you are looking for a quick sense of the topic of a text, but less interesting if you want to find particular word patterns.

Collocations with context

If you want to see a collocation in context, you can use the ‘Contexts’ tool to make a co-occurrence search to find the places in the text where the two words are used together. Remember that you can use the * to mark an open ending to a word. “love* men”~10 finds all forms of love (love, loves, loved, loving, etc) co-occurring with men within 10 words on either side. (Please note that, due to how the tool works, a search for the context of two instances of the same word, such as “love love”, will over-generate and include instances of love that do not match the pattern).

Finding phrases - introduction

We have looked at how you can explore individual words in context, retrieve combination of two known words, and find collocations in a text. These are methods you can use to explore how the poets combine words to create poetry. So far we have only looked at individual words and how they are combined. Many writers have favourite phrases that they use again and again, consciously or not. These may be difficult to spot manually, especially if you are working with a large body of material, but luckily there are text analysis tools that can help you.

Finding phrases - try it!

Go to https://voyant-tools.org/?view=Phrases and load the Owen text again. Click Reveal to see a list of recurring phrases. Click on the ‘Count’ column header. This will show you the most frequent phrases. You will notice that these are often short (two words) and usually contain one or more grammatical words. If you click on a phrase, a new window will open where you will see several tools at once. Find the ‘Contexts’ tool (bottom right) and you will be able to explore the phrases in context. Explore the other tools that you can see in the multi-tool window. The Reader (top line, middle) displays the whole text. The graph at the bottom of the Reader shows where in the text the search word or phrase occurs. The ‘Trends’ tool (top right) also shows where in the text you will find the word/phrase you are exploring. You can use both graphs to give you an idea of how widely a word or phrase is used: is it something repeated in one poem only (all instances appear close together) or a feature of the poet’s language in general (you find it in different places).

The next section will explore the multi-tool display further.