Poem fractal

Beautiful Old Age

by D. H. Lawrence

11 September 1885 to 2 March 1930 (~45)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Truth lives from day to day, and the marvellous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh to-day.”

Insisting that truth must remain alive to changing experience rather than become fixed doctrine · Critical study, Studies in Classic American Literature

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. Robert Burns · −0.1182 − 0.0033i · 0.002 away · Compare side by side
  2. John Keble · −0.1235 − 0.0129i · 0.012 away · Compare side by side
  3. Sir William Davenant · −0.1255 − 0.0131i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  4. John Clare · −0.1125 − 0.0187i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  5. Julia Ward Howe · −0.1031 − 0.0231i · 0.027 away · Compare side by side
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