Poem fractal

No Pleasure Without Some Pain

by Thomas, Lord Vaux

25 April 1509 to c. October 1556 (~47)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I humbly require you to be good unto me. I have as I perceive a great many more foes than friends, and am like, your goodness reserved, to be trodden under the feet and to be made a slave.”

A courtier's plea from a recusant peer who felt isolated after withdrawing from public life · Letter to Thomas Cromwell, 28 April 1536

Drawing the boundary…

Read the poem Another poem

A fractal is a shape that keeps its pattern when you look closer. Coastlines, trees, shells, and weather do this. A poem can be drawn the same way.

The poem’s constant is read from the build of its lines: their length, the size of the stanzas, and the share of vowels. Poems whose constants lie closer together are built more alike. The same poem always draws the same picture. Change the length of a line, the stanza, or the vowel share, and both the number and the picture move.

Primunia is the name for the source of that order: the pattern under the pattern, already there in a tree, a shell, and a verse.

Poems nearby in the constant

A smaller distance means the lines are built more alike.

  1. John Donne · 0.4652 + 0.1045i · 0.007 away · Compare side by side
  2. John Donne · 0.4879 + 0.1393i · 0.044 away · Compare side by side
  3. John Boyle O'Reilly · 0.4384 + 0.0552i · 0.055 away · Compare side by side
  4. King James I of Scotland · 0.5021 + 0.1434i · 0.057 away · Compare side by side
  5. Philip Bourke Marston · 0.4156 + 0.1507i · 0.062 away · Compare side by side
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