FROM STANZAS TO STATISTICS: UNVEILING PATTERNS IN SAROJINI NAIDU'S POETRY

Sarojini Naidu, often called the Nightingale of India, is celebrated for her writings, which are rich in India’s cultural heritage. We analyse three of her impeccable poems—“Coromandel Fishers”, “The Queen’s Rival”, and “Village Song”—to conduct a statistical study on the following features: To check if the number of words per line is uniformly distributed To study the frequency distribution of word length and other statistical measures such as mean-word-length, variance of word-length, standard deviation, coefficient of skewness and coefficient of variation To calculate the distance between the probability distribution of frequency of word-length for two poems Examination of the rhythmic structure of the poems Determining the verb-to-adjective ratio for each of the poems To determine the ratio of vowels to consonants and finding the vowel proportion After conducting statistical analysis on the aforementioned poems, it was found that the distribution of number of words per line may be considered to be uniform in all the three poems which are tested using the Chi-Square goodness of fit test. The distance between the probability distributions is determined by summing |pi-p’i| where pi and pi’ are probabilities of the occurrence of the ith word length respectively in the two poems under consideration. It is found that the distance between each of the individual pairs of poems is less than 0.5, thus the poems are quite close with respect to probabilistic structure of word length. The poems -”Coromandel Fishers” and “Village Song”- follow a rhyme pattern of AABB whereas the poem –“The Queen’s Rival”- follows a rhythmic scheme of AABBCC. The verb-to-adjective ratio, ranging from 1.8 to 3.0, highlight stylistic differences among the poems and suggest potential avenues for identifying a unique linguistic fingerprint for the poetess.