A blog has used Google to compile what it believes is the world’s fifty most commonly quoted line of poetry.
Writing on The Inky Fool, MH Forsyth admits the method – which basically involves asking Google how many times a particular line of verse has been searched for – is flawed due to Google’s mysteriously inconsistent figures.
But as a rough guide to which lines of poetry have stuck in our minds the most, the list makes for interesting reading – not least of all because it’s topped by 18th century satirist Alexander Pope.
The Inky Fool’s rules were that it had to be a full line of no less than 8 syllables, that it couldn’t be a line already popularised as the title of a film or song and that it couldn’t be a line from children’s literature.
Coming up behind Pope in the top 5 are William Ernest Henley, who wrote Inviticus, American writer Robert Frost and a certain Romantic poet who spent a lot of time wandering around the Lake District, who appears twice.
Check out the top five below, or for the full fifty along with the specific search figures, check out The Inky Fool.
- 5 “And miles to go before I sleep” - Robert Frost
- 4 “I wandered lonely as a cloud” – William Wordsworth
- 3 “The child is father of the man” – William Wordsworth
- 2 “I am the master of my fate” - William Ernest Henley
- 1 “To err is human; to forgive, divine” - Alexander Pope