Poem fractal

The Vagabond

by Robert Louis Stevenson

13 November 1850 to 3 December 1894 (~44)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.”

Affirming the value of direct experience alongside reading · Essay, A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas

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. William Ernest Henley · 0.3240 − 0.6819i · 0.010 away · Compare side by side
  2. Edna St. Vincent Millay · 0.3205 − 0.6982i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  3. T. S. Eliot · 0.3670 − 0.6817i · 0.036 away · Compare side by side
  4. Richard · 0.3634 − 0.6980i · 0.039 away · Compare side by side
  5. Christina Rossetti · 0.2907 − 0.6899i · 0.043 away · Compare side by side
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