Poem fractal

I Stood with the Dead

by Siegfried Sassoon

8 September 1886 to 1 September 1967 (~81)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and can no longer be a party to prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be wrong and unjust.”

Grounding dissent in witnessed suffering and moral conviction · Open letter, 1917

More remarks (4)

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. Gwendolyn B. Bennett · 0.2536 + 0.3288i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  2. William Ernest Henley · 0.2429 + 0.3356i · 0.037 away · Compare side by side
  3. Richard · 0.2383 + 0.3061i · 0.045 away · Compare side by side
  4. Philip Bourke Marston · 0.2602 + 0.3784i · 0.056 away · Compare side by side
  5. George Peele · 0.3185 + 0.2777i · 0.062 away · Compare side by side
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