Bringing Poetic Beauty to Sight by Krist Wongsuphasawat

"How can we convey the beauty of poetry into a form that the eye can perceive?"

This piece experiments with a number of famous Thai eight line poems and gives them a different visual display than the typically flat and monochrome text. Many verses are from Sunthorn Phu, Thailand’s best-known royal poet. More information about Thai poetry and its structure can be found here. https://www.thaienquirer.com/50051/an-introduction-to-the-poetry-of-sunthorn-phu/

The syllables from each line of the poem are arranged onto the five-line staff of musical notation, adapted to represent the 5 tones in Thai language. Sequential color palettes were chosen to double-encode the tone and also reflect the meaning of the poems. For example, in a poem which the poet was comparing love with vegetable soup, the color palette was a gradient from green (vegetable) to pink (love). The resulting visualization reveals the rise and fall of tones much more clearly.

Solid curves are drawn to connect the required rhymes between poem lines (aka external rhymes), while dashed curves link rhymes within poem lines that were additionally included by the authors (aka internal rhymes).

Then, the syllables forming consecutive rhymes are counted, with markers indicating their continuity, akin to combos in a game. Notably, verses with higher number of consecutive rhymes often resonate with a sense of elegance and fluidity.

This simple visualization adds extra visual cues to the readers to help them appreciate the linguistic beauty while keeping the poems readable just like its common form. The simplicity of this technique also makes it applicable to other kinds of poems that are not the eight-line poems as well.