Poem fractal

Love's Answer

by Philip Bourke Marston

13 August 1850 to 13 February 1887 (~37)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I want to tell them of what the flowers talk about when the garden is very still.”

A characteristic expression of Marston's imaginative intimacy with the natural world · Letter, quoted in an 1887 reminiscence

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. Edgar Lee Masters · −0.2200 + 0.1728i · 0.002 away · Compare side by side
  2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge · −0.2309 + 0.1734i · 0.010 away · Compare side by side
  3. G. K. Chesterton · −0.2068 + 0.1702i · 0.015 away · Compare side by side
  4. John Donne · −0.2324 + 0.1908i · 0.020 away · Compare side by side
  5. D. H. Lawrence · −0.2331 + 0.1925i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
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