Poem fractal

Side by side

Random

0.019 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.

What is Life?

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

−0.2309 + 0.1734i

Drawing the boundary…

Underneath

by D. H. Lawrence

−0.2331 + 0.1925i

Drawing the boundary…

The poems

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

What is Life?

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Resembles life what once was deem’d of light,
Too ample in itself for human sight?
An absolute self—an element ungrounded—
All that we see, all colors of all shade
By encroach of darkness made?—
Is very life by consciousness unbounded?
And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath,
A war-embrace of wrestling life and death?

Underneath

by D. H. Lawrence

Below what we think we are
we are something else,
we are almost anything.

Below the grass and trees
and streets and houses and even seas
is rock; and below the rock, the rock
is we know not what,
the hot wild core of the earth, heavier than we can even imagine.

Pivotal core of the soul, heavier than iron
so ponderously central;
heavier and hotter than anything known;
and also alone.—
And yet
reeling with connection
spinning with the heaviness of balance
and flowing invisibly, gasping
towards the breathing stars and the central of all sunninesses.

The earth leans its weight on the sun, and the sun on the sun of suns.
Back and forth goes the balance and the electric breath.

The soul of man also leans in the unconscious inclination we call religion
towards the sun of suns, and back and forth goes the breath
of incipient energetic life.

Out of the soul's middle to the middle-most sun, way-off, or in every atom.

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