A poem in a real form — with the form actually checked
Give it a subject, a mood and a form. You get a poem back with its structure shown: the rhyme scheme read off its own line endings, the syllable count per line, the metre, and where the turn or the refrain falls.
The checking happens in your browser, free and without an account. So you can paste a poem you wrote and have it scanned — and so every poem the model writes is scanned here too. If it says sonnet and delivers thirteen lines, you are told.
The example ships with a saved model run, so you can see the whole thing — poem, scan, reconciliation — without signing in and without spending a credit.
How the checking works, and where it stops working
Three different things get checked, and they are not equally checkable. This app tries to be clear about which is which rather than presenting one confidence for all of them.
- Counting is reliable. Lines, stanzas, and which lines repeat are simply counted. A villanelle either has nineteen lines or it does not. Syllables come from a word list of about twelve hundred entries plus rules over vowel groups, and the words English cannot agree on — fire, flower, hour, every, heaven — are never given a single number. Those lines are shown as a range, and a poem that hits its form on only one reading is labelled as such.
- Rhyme needs pronunciation, not spelling. Love and move are not a rhyme; cough, bough and though are three different sounds in one spelling. So rhyme here is decided from a curated table of rhyme families rather than from the last few letters. When a word is not in the table and its ending is one of the unreliable ones, this app says could not check — a third answer, kept separate from rhymes and does not, and shown as its own badge.
- Metre is stress, and stress is the hardest of the three. Iambic pentameter is not ten syllables; it is a pattern of alternating stress across them. A word of two or more syllables has its stress fixed by the dictionary, so it is evidence. A one-syllable word is not. English gives monosyllables their stress from the sentence, which is why the cat sat on the mat can be read as either an iambic line or a trochaic one. So this app excludes monosyllables from the metre score entirely — not as agreeing, not as disagreeing — and reports metre as a fraction: how many fixed-stress positions agreed, out of how many there were.
What that means in practice. A line built entirely from short words — and English verse is full of them — will report that its length is right and its stress could not be checked. That is not the scanner failing; it is the scanner declining to score its own guess. A scanner that assigned the a weak beat and cat a strong one and then announced the line iambic would have proved nothing except that it wrote down the pattern it was looking for.
Measured, so you can weigh it: on the words in its own rhyme table, the spelling rules alone never contradict the curated pronunciation. On a held-out set of 62 pairs the table had never seen, it answered 38 and refused 24 — and of the 38 answers, none was wrong in either direction. The refusals are the price of that, and they are deliberate. The stress table is cross-checked against the syllable counter at load: any word where the two disagree is used by neither.