Poem fractal

Love in a Life

by Robert Browning

7 May 1812 to 12 December 1889 (~77)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“You speak out, you,—I only make men and women speak—give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me.”

A striking description of his dramatic method of revealing truth through imagined voices · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 13 January 1845

More remarks (16)

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. Algernon Charles Swinburne · −0.0334 + 0.3120i · 0.005 away · Compare side by side
  2. A. A. Milne · −0.0168 + 0.3106i · 0.017 away · Compare side by side
  3. Ralph Waldo Emerson · −0.0104 + 0.3089i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  4. Leigh Hunt · −0.0430 + 0.3308i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  5. Thomas d'Urfey · −0.0376 + 0.3345i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
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