The Measure of Resonance: A Computational Cross-Cultural Analysis of Floral Poetics in Tang and Renaissance Verse

The systematic comparison of pre-modern literary traditions demands a methodology capable of balancing historical specificity with analytical rigor. This study constructs an integrative framework that bridges deep hermeneutic traditions and computational literary analysis. Focusing on the peony in Tang-dynasty China (618–907 CE) and the rose in Renaissance England (ca. 1500–1660 CE), we situate these emblematic flowers within Janet Abu-Lughod’s paradigm of the pre-modern Afro-Eurasian “world system”, establishing their comparability as distinct yet interconnected cultural formations. To move beyond impressionistic analogy, we introduce a computational transposition of the logic of cultural dimensions research—the translation of abstract values into measurable axes of variation—from sociological surveys to poetic language. Treating the peony and the rose as Ernst Cassirer’s symbolic forms, we employ a multi-method computational triangulation—multilingual BERT embeddings for semantic resonance, LDA topic modeling for thematic structure, and transformer-based emotion analysis for affective tonality—to model their symbolic architectures across a bilingual corpus of 49 Tang peony poems and 45 Renaissance rose sonnets after quality control and alignment constraints. Results reveal a shared preoccupation with beauty and transience as a universal axis of meaning. Yet a significant negative correlation (r = −0.128, p < 0.05) between semantic and thematic alignment suggests a pattern of structural complementarity rather than direct similarity: Tang and Renaissance poetics converge in emotional and aesthetic concerns while diverging in symbolic framing. The study thus proposes both a substantive insight into cross-civilizational poetics and a transferable methodological paradigm—one that complements close reading with empirical scalability and structural clarity in the comparative study of the world literature.