Poem fractal

To His Watch, When He Could Not Sleep

by Edward Herbert

3 March 1583 to 20 August 1648 (~65)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“He ought to be worshipped.”

Expressing religious duty as a universal obligation · Treatise on natural religion, De Veritate

More remarks (4)

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 Beattie · 0.3019 − 0.0365i · 0.032 away · Compare side by side
  2. Richard Monckton Milnes · 0.2441 − 0.0069i · 0.034 away · Compare side by side
  3. Walter Savage Landor · 0.3040 − 0.0203i · 0.034 away · Compare side by side
  4. D. H. Lawrence · 0.2868 − 0.0648i · 0.040 away · Compare side by side
  5. George Sterling · 0.3105 − 0.0338i · 0.040 away · Compare side by side
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