Poem fractal

Love laid his sleepless head

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

5 April 1837 to 10 April 1909 (~72)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I am not a professional or official poet, and could not undertake to write any verse—patriotic or other—to order.”

Rejecting the idea of poetry as work manufactured on command · Letter, 1899

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. Robert Herrick · −0.6677 − 0.7562i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  2. Thomas Hardy · −0.6540 − 0.7416i · 0.015 away · Compare side by side
  3. Carl Sandburg · −0.6439 − 0.7432i · 0.017 away · Compare side by side
  4. Fiona Macleod · −0.6185 − 0.7356i · 0.042 away · Compare side by side
  5. Emily Dickinson · −0.6304 − 0.7167i · 0.047 away · Compare side by side
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