Poem fractal

Money-Madness

by D. H. Lawrence

11 September 1885 to 2 March 1930 (~45)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

A stark diagnosis of the national character and its emotional reserve · Critical essay

More remarks (51)

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. Leigh Hunt · 0.5637 + 0.0016i · 0.036 away · Compare side by side
  2. Stephen Collins Foster · 0.6269 + 0.0440i · 0.043 away · Compare side by side
  3. Conrad Aiken · 0.6052 + 0.0739i · 0.049 away · Compare side by side
  4. Frederic William Moorman · 0.5456 − 0.0004i · 0.050 away · Compare side by side
  5. Arthur Rimbaud · 0.6270 + 0.0667i · 0.055 away · Compare side by side
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