Free instrument
Set a poem
the way it deservesFree poem card maker
Paste a poem, or pick one from the catalogue, and get an image worth sharing — one line set large, a whole short poem on a book page, a clean broadside for your own writing, or a few lines beside an illustration drawn for that poem. Six templates, three sizes, and the typeset cards are free with no account.
01
Six templates, six different jobs
The One Line takes a single line and sets it large enough to stop a scroll — a dark card, the only dark one, with the line's position printed underneath it. Knowing that a line is the ninth of fourteen, and that the ninth is where a sonnet turns, is the kind of thing a poetry site can tell you and a generic quote-card app cannot.
The Page sets a whole short poem on a warm book page, exactly as printed — the lineation, the indentation, the stanza breaks. It is the safe default: it asks nothing of you and cannot look wrong.
The Broadside is for your own work. Wide margins, clean stock, your name set as a signature beneath the poem rather than a byline above it. No badge, no ornament, nothing of ours on it at all.
Verse & Ink is the one card that draws. A model reads the poem, decides what a single illustration should hold, and an image model draws it — as an etching, a watercolor, a woodcut, or whatever the poem asks for. The type answers the art: an etching gets an italic serif, a woodcut gets the typewriter. It costs five credits because the drawing costs us real money; everything else here is free.
The two classroom sheets — the Scansion Sheet and the Close-Reading Sheet — are PDFs, made for the photocopier rather than the feed. The scansion sheet arrives with a marked answer key and a blank copy for the class; the close-reading sheet numbers the lines and rules a margin to write in.
02
Why the lineation is never adjusted
A poem's line breaks are not formatting. They are where the poet decided the line ends, and shifting one changes the poem — so no card here will wrap a line to make it fit. Instead the type is sized down until the longest line fits as written, and if it still will not fit, the tool refuses and tells you why.
That is a deliberately awkward behaviour. Most image tools would rather produce something than nothing, and the something they produce is a poem with line breaks it did not have. We would rather hand back a clear no.
03
What happens to what you paste
The text goes to our server, gets typeset, and comes back as an image. It is not sent to any AI model — these templates involve no model call whatsoever — and it is not added to any public page.
The finished card is stored in private object storage and served only through a short-lived signed link. If you made it while signed in, only you can open it, and you can delete it. If you made it without an account, the link is the only way to it and it is removed after thirty days.
04Questions
Is it free?
Five of the six templates are, completely, and there is no account to make. Those cards are typeset rather than generated — the layout is real typography, not a model writing an image — so they cost us almost nothing to produce and there is no credit to spend. The one exception is Verse & Ink, which commissions an illustration and costs five credits.
Can I use my own poem?
Yes, and one template exists specifically for that. The Broadside carries no Storgy mark, no ornament and no aged-paper costume, because a poem you finished last night should not be dressed as somebody else's antique.
Will my poem be published anywhere?
No. The card is stored privately and reachable only through a signed link that expires; it is never indexed, never listed, and never shown to anyone else. Cards made without an account are deleted automatically after thirty days.
Why did it refuse to make my card?
Two reasons, both about honesty rather than capacity. If the poem is too long to set legibly, shrinking it further would make a card nobody can read. If a single line is too wide, the only way to fit it would be to wrap it — and a wrapped line looks exactly like a line break the poet wrote. In both cases the tool says so instead of quietly deciding for you.
Which line does 'The One Line' choose?
It reads the poem's structure. In a fourteen-line poem it takes the volta — line nine, where a sonnet's argument turns. Otherwise it takes the close of the first stanza, and failing that the line with the densest alliteration. You can override it with any line in the poem, and the card records which line it was: 'line 9 of 14'.
Can I use these commercially?
The card is yours to use as you like, but the poem still belongs to whoever wrote it. Public-domain poems are free to reproduce; anything still in copyright is not, whatever the card looks like. If you hold rights in something published here, our copyright page explains how to have it removed.
05Correlated instruments
Rhyme Scheme Finder
The scheme as letters, slant rhymes included — the same corpus, read for sound.
Inst. 02Iambic Pentameter Checker
Every line marked against the da-DUM × 5 pattern, with the substitutions named.
Inst. 03Poem Analyzer
The full reading: theme, tone, devices, line by line.
A poem is a made object. It should look like one.
Cards are typeset from your text and stored privately. Only paste work you have the right to use — see our copyright page if something of yours appears here.