Poem fractal

Side by side

Random

0.037 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.

Sympathy

by Francis Hastings Doyle

−0.5278 − 0.5410i

Drawing the boundary…

Suicide

by William Ernest Henley

−0.5263 − 0.5779i

Drawing the boundary…

The poems

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

Sympathy

by Francis Hastings Doyle

The dew-drop is a trivial thing,
Yet it lends freshness to the rose,
When diamonds, from the sun would fling,
New withering on her wan repose.

With pride of their own lustre fired,
The unloving gems burn on in vain;
The humble dew-drop, love inspired,
Can wake the flower to life again.

Judge not a gift from outward show,
Nor test it by its actual worth;
These are its body, far below,
Its soul, is that which gives it birth.

Suicide

by William Ernest Henley

Staring corpselike at the ceiling,
See his harsh, unrazored features,
Ghastly brown against the pillow,
And his throat—so strangely bandaged!

Lack of work and lack of victuals,
A debauch of smuggled whisky,
And his children in the workhouse
Made the world so black a riddle

That he plunged for a solution;
And, although his knife was edgeless,
He was sinking fast towards one,
When they came, and found, and saved him.

Stupid now with shame and sorrow,
In the night I hear him sobbing.
But sometimes he talks a little.
He has told me all his troubles.

In his broad face, tanned and bloodless,
White and wild his eyeballs glisten;
And his smile, occult and tragic,
Yet so slavish, makes you shudder!

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