Is there an online tool that would do scansion for me?

June 11, 2008 9:59 PM

Is there an online tool that would give me the metrical foot of a sentence I type in?

For instance, were I to type in
" Should you ask me, whence these stories?/ Whence these legends and traditions,"

from Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha, is there anything tool that would return either:

¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘/ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ˘ ˘ ¯ ˘

or

Should you ask me, whence these stories?
Whence these legends and traditions,

I am writing a set of my own poems, but I have a very hard time trying to write in a trochaic verse. I am always second guessing myself etc. plus I would love to check certain words out and see where they fall.

posted by Carillon to Writing & Language (3 answers total)

Best answer: Try this, Speechlab from Synthetic Reality. It's intended to do text-to-speech, but it does so by doing text-to-phonetics, then phonetics-to-speech. Since it shows the intermediate step, it may incidentally do what you want it to do.

(And incidentally, maybe something I want to do. I've been looking for a glossollalia generator for some time. Thank you for (possibly) helping me find one.)
posted by aeschenkarnos at 11:20 PM on June 11, 2008 [1 favorite]

You might want to contact this person if you can't find anything.
posted by rhizome at 7:25 AM on June 12, 2008 [1 favorite]

What about Rhyme & Reason?

According to the FAQ it includes "...metrical scanning tools for identifying meter and rhyme scheme."
posted by sentient at 4:55 PM on June 12, 2008 [1 favorite]