Poem fractal

A Creole Slave-Song

by Maurice Thompson

9 September 1844 to 15 February 1901 (~57)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The poetry of solitude stalks embodied as a sylvan toxophilite who goes alone into a primeval grove.”

The solitary archer as a walking figure of lyric isolation · Essay, An Archer on the Kankakee

More remarks (18)

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. Robert Browning · 0.2200 − 0.3322i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  2. Thomas MacDonagh · 0.1907 − 0.3218i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  3. Charlotte Brontë · 0.1922 − 0.3014i · 0.038 away · Compare side by side
  4. Dorothy Parker · 0.2370 − 0.3644i · 0.042 away · Compare side by side
  5. Christina Rossetti · 0.1660 − 0.3524i · 0.042 away · Compare side by side
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