Poem fractal

Before Parting

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

5 April 1837 to 10 April 1909 (~72)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“It is sinuous as water or as light, flexible and penetrative, delicate and rapid; it works on its way without halt or jar or collapse.”

Describing ideal style as fluid, flexible and effortless · Essay, The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

More remarks (54)

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. John Donne · 0.1447 + 0.0375i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  2. Mary Coleridge · 0.1379 + 0.0495i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  3. Thomas Heywood · 0.1511 + 0.0498i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
  4. Robert Frost · 0.0990 + 0.0683i · 0.049 away · Compare side by side
  5. Arthur Symons · 0.1409 + 0.0797i · 0.052 away · Compare side by side
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