Poem fractal

Youth is old before his time

by Archibald MacLeish

7 May 1892 to 20 April 1982 (~90)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“A world ends when its metaphor has died.”

Suggesting that cultures lose their vitality when their central imaginative symbols cease to live · Essay

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. A. Mary F. Robinson · 0.1377 − 0.7005i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  2. William Butler Yeats · 0.1689 − 0.7017i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  3. George Wither · 0.1631 − 0.7358i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
  4. Arthur Symons · 0.1777 − 0.7031i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
  5. Alfred Austin · 0.1354 − 0.6834i · 0.035 away · Compare side by side
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