Did you know? Did you know that old free books from the Gutenberg archive could contain hidden haiku poems? Well, some do. For example, there are hidden haikus in the following books:
- Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne
- Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- The Time Machine by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
- Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
I’ve got a blog dedicated to this, but my script that dug through the site for such hidden poems and posted them automatically to the blog broke down and I haven’t fixed it. So, once in a while I come across nice old titles throught the Gutenberg Twitter account and run my findhaikus script on the raw text version of the book.
My szcript that blogged doesn’t work, but my script which sends the haikus found over email works, and can be found on GitLab.
Here are the haikus found in “The War of the Worlds” by H. G. Wells:
Then he dropped his spade,
snatched up his jacket, and came
out into the road.
“Lord!” said the landlord;
“what’s the hurry? I’m selling
my bit of a pig.
He read and re-read
the paper, fearing the worst
had happened to me.
They both stopped in sight
down the lane, where the third man
lay insensible.
I have myself seen
this being done, as I shall
mention in its place.
All this time I saw
no human beings, and no
signs of the Martians.