Poem fractal

Dirge

by Gwendolyn B. Bennett

8 July 1902 to 30 May 1981 (~79)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Could I mark this day I should put a black ring around it as one of the saddest days I have ever spent.”

Recording an intense moment of loneliness and homesickness in Paris · Diary, France

More remarks (8)

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. Emily Dickinson · 0.5473 − 0.7928i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  2. Robert Herrick · 0.5400 − 0.8062i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  3. Alexander Scott · 0.5266 − 0.7545i · 0.027 away · Compare side by side
  4. Christina Rossetti · 0.5503 − 0.7302i · 0.053 away · Compare side by side
  5. A.E.Housman · 0.5586 − 0.7180i · 0.067 away · Compare side by side
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