Poem fractal

She that denies me

by Thomas Heywood

c. 1574 to August 1641 (~67)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I have had either an entire hand, or at the least a main finger, in two hundred and twenty plays.”

His own account of a vast collaborative output, most of it lost · Address to the Reader, The English Traveller

More remarks (12)

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. Mary Coleridge · 0.1379 + 0.0495i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  2. John Donne · 0.1447 + 0.0375i · 0.014 away · Compare side by side
  3. Algernon Charles Swinburne · 0.1288 + 0.0295i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
  4. Arthur Symons · 0.1409 + 0.0797i · 0.032 away · Compare side by side
  5. Ernest Hemingway · 0.1709 + 0.0840i · 0.040 away · Compare side by side
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