Poem fractal

Love Me if I Live

by Barry Cornwall

21 November 1787 to 5 October 1874 (~87)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I do not think it decent to manufacture the sweet liquor myself.”

Mocking the vanity of manufacturing one's own praise · Letter to James T. Fields, quoted in the 1877 biographical volume

More remarks (49)

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. James Joyce · 1.0486 − 1.2466i · 0.070 away · Compare side by side
  2. Publius Aelius Hadrianus · 1.0256 − 1.1804i · 0.070 away · Compare side by side
  3. Emily Dickinson · 0.9151 − 1.2775i · 0.078 away · Compare side by side
  4. Charles Bertram Johnson · 0.8953 − 1.2419i · 0.085 away · Compare side by side
  5. Paul Valéry · 0.9475 − 1.1038i · 0.134 away · Compare side by side
—
—
0:00
0:00
Track 1
Skip to main content