Poem fractal

You that seek what life is in death

by Fulke Greville

3 October 1554 to 30 September 1628 (~74)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“With humble sails, after I had once ventured upon this spreading ocean of images, my apprehensive youth, for lack of a well touched compass, did easily wander beyond proportion.”

On how his early tragedies outgrew their design once imagination took hold · Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney

More remarks (5)

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. Edna St. Vincent Millay · 0.5616 − 0.3999i · 0.034 away · Compare side by side
  2. Ben Jonson · 0.5460 − 0.3294i · 0.040 away · Compare side by side
  3. Joanna Baillie · 0.5025 − 0.3890i · 0.048 away · Compare side by side
  4. Ella Wheeler Wilcox · 0.5327 − 0.3217i · 0.049 away · Compare side by side
  5. Thomas Carew · 0.5182 − 0.4131i · 0.052 away · Compare side by side
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