코퍼스에 기반한 시 텍스트의 분석

Corpus-based Analysis of Poetry Text: Comparison of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets and George Herbert’s The Temple

The use of corpora to analyse literary texts has concentrated on prose and the main focus has been on the relevance between keywords and themes. This corpus study intends to expand the research scope to include poetry. For this purpose, two collections of poems, John Donne’s Holy sonnets and George Herbert’s The Temple were chosen and converted into separated corpora. Corpus analysis using WordSmith tool was conducted to identify similarities and differences of the two corpora. The results of the analysis are as follows: First, it could be inferred that Holy Sonnets belongs to lyric poetry, whereas The Temple belongs to didactic poetry. Second, Holy Sonnets represents the theme of God and death, whereas The Temple represents the theme of God and love. Third, while Holy Sonnets has a negative tone about death and love, The Temple has a negative tone about death but a positive tone about God and love. In summary, the two collections reflect the fact that the two writers are metaphysical poets and share similar backgrounds. As such, corpus analysis can be utilized for poetic text and could be considered a new approach to understanding poetry.