Poem fractal

Side by side

Random

0.060 apart. A smaller distance means the lines are built more alike.

This number is read from the build of the lines. The bright edge is that number, carried outward until the pattern repeats.

To a Snail

by Marianne Moore

0.3909 + 0.3032i

Drawing the boundary…

Wages

by D. H. Lawrence

0.3532 + 0.3494i

Drawing the boundary…

The poems

Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.

To a Snail

by Marianne Moore

If "compression is the first grace of style,"
you have it. Contractility is a virtue
as modesty is a virtue.
It is not the acquisition of any one thing
that is able to adorn,
or the incidental quality that occurs
as a concomitant of something well said,
that we value in style,
but the principle that is hid:
in the absence of feet, "a method of conclusions";
"a knowledge of principles,"
in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn.

Wages

by D. H. Lawrence

The wages of work is cash.
The wages of cash is want more cash.
The wages of want more cash is vicious competition.
The wages of vicious competition is—the world we live in.

The work-cash-want circle is the viciousest circle
that ever turned men into fiends.

Earning a wage is a prison occupation
and a wage-earner is a sort of gaol-bird.
Earning a salary is a prison overseer's job,
a gaoler instead of a gaol-bird.

Living on your income is strolling grandly outside the prison
in terror lest you have to go in. And since the work-prison covers
almost every scrap of the living earth, you stroll up and down
on a narrow beat, about the same as a prisoner taking his exercise.

This is called universal freedom.

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