For my voyant analysis I worked on worked on William Wordsworth collection of Poems “Lyrical Ballads”, and decided to analyse his usage of nature and natural elements. That being said, I was very surprised to find that the most recurring words were names! In a collection of poetry, this was shocking to me, but actually clued me in to how Wordsworth will repetitively state the same detail noun or name multiple times throughout a poem. That being said, it didn’t exactly mesh with the rest of the corpus, so I decided to focus on a few key words.

On my second run through I decided to really zero in on the words depicting nature and feeling. Words like sad, happy, glad, sun, day, night, moon, etc. Now, wordsworth poems tend to zero in on the earlier hours of day over that of night. Words like sun, bright, and early showed up twice as much or more consistently in poems then their counterparts moon, dark, and late. That being said, words associated or connotated with negative emotions showed up much more then positive variants, such as fear, sadness, despair, etc. This was a fairly fascinating phenomena for me, while Wordsworth fixated much more on the earlier times of day and brighter colors, his observations of said nature was remarkably depressed in feeling.

Having noted this, I decided to focus around the words surrounding negative emotions, and likewise the words surrounding positive ones. “Sad Case” was an oft repeated phrase, as well as “how sad.” These are more phrases used to describe an event, rather then adjectively or descriptively. On the other hand, Wordsworth positive adjectives and descriptory words were used in direct connection with nature, he might describe an “refreshing meadow” or a “glade filled with happiness.” A certain trend seems to develop in Wordsworth’s works, he describes nature as happy, and then his fundamental analysis of it turns out to be depressing.

This trend is fairly consistent along Wordsworth’s poems, he tends to repeatedly begin with a straightforward description of what he is observing, followed by negative emotions and darker elements of nature. The blatantly negative emotions such as sadness, anger, or depression were the most repeated, but there’s also less extreme descriptions of listlessness, anxiety, and restlessness. Ultimately Wordsworth usually ends his poems somewhat optimistically and begins them with colorful descriptions of nature. I wasn’t aware of how much the beginning and the end influenced my thought process, because before analyzing these with voyant I would have said the general connotation of his poems are generally happier. But through Voyant I was able to extract a much more consistent, darker tone that ultimately contradicts my initial observation of Wordsworth.