Corpus speaking: Eros and spirit in Natalie Rice’s 26 Visions of Light

Abstract

Based in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canadian poet Natalie Rice has published poems in various literary magazines. 26 Visions of Light (2020) is her debut collection, a chapbook published by Gaspereau Press, subtitled After Hildegard von Bingen’s illustrated work Scivias, and consisting of a meditative sequence of twenty-six short lyrics, marked by a spontaneous verbal flow. Known as Saint Hildegard and the Sibyl of the Rhine, Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 1179) was a German Benedictine abbess and the author of a trilogy of works describing her divine visions: Scivias, Liber vitae meritorum, and De operatione Dei (also known as Liber divinorum operum). In her illustrated Scivias, completed in 1151 or 1152, Hildegard describes 26 religious visions she experienced in climactic moments of her life. Rice’s 26 short lyrics can be interpreted as being “responses” to Hildegard’s Scivias, “condensed adaptations of the original work” or “a combination of the two” (McLennan, 2021). In this chapter, Corpus Linguistics is used as a methodology to investigate the lexical cosmos of the 26 lyric poems composed by Rice to evoke Hildegard’s religious thought for 21st-century readers. More specifically, the corpus management software Sketch Engine is used to analyse the terminology (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) shaping her response to the original Latin text from an ecocritical perspective, sensitive to the more-than-human world. Rice’s collection ultimately reveals how Hildegard knew how to pay close attention to vibrant matter and the nonhuman entities populating Earth.