Poem fractal

A little time for laughter

by Philip Bourke Marston

13 August 1850 to 13 February 1887 (~37)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Much as we all love and admire your work, it seems to me we have not yet fully realized the unostentatious loveliness of your lyrics, as fine for lyrics as your best sonnets are for sonnets.”

Praising lyric poetry whose artistry works without display or self-consciousness · Letter to Louise Chandler Moulton, quoted in Representative Women of New England

More remarks (9)

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. Sara Teasdale · 0.1780 − 0.8708i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  2. William Blake · 0.1617 − 0.8731i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
  3. Emily Dickinson · 0.1994 − 0.9180i · 0.033 away · Compare side by side
  4. Mary Coleridge · 0.1453 − 0.8698i · 0.047 away · Compare side by side
  5. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois · 0.1505 − 0.9186i · 0.050 away · Compare side by side
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