Poem fractal

Vitae Summa Brevis

by Ernest Dowson

2 August 1867 to 23 February 1900 (~33)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I smoke — smoke — smoke — read some — & think not at all.”

A wonderfully compressed picture of an idle holiday and deliberate escape from thought · Letter to Victor Plarr from the Norfolk Broads, undated, c. 1892–93

More remarks (40)

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. Nora Hopper Chesson · 0.4249 − 0.3404i · 0.038 away · Compare side by side
  2. Paul Laurence Dunbar · 0.3915 − 0.4083i · 0.044 away · Compare side by side
  3. William Hughes Mearns · 0.4674 − 0.3852i · 0.044 away · Compare side by side
  4. Nora Hopper Chesson · 0.4660 − 0.3632i · 0.045 away · Compare side by side
  5. A. A. Milne · 0.4752 − 0.3944i · 0.054 away · Compare side by side
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