The Sweet Poetry of Maps

I'm constantly surprised by the imaginative uses developers find for online mapping libraries. I really like this little experiment that uses Neatline to map out the last three lines of W. B. Yeats's poem 'The Song Of Wandering Aengus'.

Neatline is a tool for creating story maps with timelines or text. It is a wonderful tool for creating narrative maps when you have a story to tell that involves text (or a timeline) with a lot of related locations. It appears that you can also use it to map out poetry.

The Song Of Wandering Aengus Map is an experiment in mapping out the last three lines of Yeats's poem. Each consecutive line of the poem is mapped inside the dot above an 'i' in the previous line. Zoom in on the dot above the 'i' in each line and the next line in the poem appears.

It may be only a small experiment but it made me feel like Aengus himself, who dropped a berry in a stream and caught a little silver trout.