SOURCE: Dilligan, Robert. “Computers and Style: The Prosody of In Memoriam.” Victorian Poetry 18, no. 2 (summer 1980): 179-96.

In the following essay, Dilligan provides a computer-aided analysis of In Memoriam that enlightens the connection between grammar and prosody, The critic also provides a detailed discussion of the poem's syntax.

I

One way of understanding how a critic may use a computer is to make an analogy between a computer and a piano. From a logical point of view, a piano is a binary machine with eighty-eight switches of which, because of the limitations of its operators, only about ten can be depressed at any given time. Thought of in this way, a piano seems a rather useless machine. But we are not accustomed to think of a piano as a binary machine; rather, we think of it as an instrument used to interpret a kind of human experience—music. Whether...