Poem fractal

The First Kiss

by Philip Bourke Marston

13 August 1850 to 13 February 1887 (~37)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The divine simplicity, strength and subtlety, the intense, fragrant, genuine individuality of your poems will make them imperishable.”

Valuing simplicity, strength, subtlety and individuality as qualities that give poetry lasting life · Letter to Louise Chandler Moulton, quoted in Representative Women of New England

More remarks (9)

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. Thomas Babington Macaulay · −0.2521 + 0.3036i · 0.034 away · Compare side by side
  2. Lucian B. Watkins · −0.1986 + 0.3238i · 0.039 away · Compare side by side
  3. T. S. Eliot · −0.2194 + 0.3697i · 0.040 away · Compare side by side
  4. William Butler Yeats · −0.1937 + 0.3245i · 0.044 away · Compare side by side
  5. William Wordsworth · −0.2395 + 0.3791i · 0.046 away · Compare side by side
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