Poem fractal

What have I left to doe but dye

by Charles Cotton

28 April 1630 to 16 February 1687 (~57)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Though fools spurn Hymen's gentle powers, we, who improve his golden hours, by sweet experience know that marriage, rightly understood, gives to the tender and the good a paradise below.”

Celebrating marriage as a source of earthly happiness when properly valued · The Fire-side

More remarks (1)

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 Randolph · 0.2259 − 0.7355i · 0.009 away · Compare side by side
  2. A. A. Milne · 0.2183 − 0.7350i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  3. Mina Loy · 0.2130 − 0.7296i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edward James Mortimer Collins · 0.2493 − 0.7163i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  5. Fannie Isabel Sherrick · 0.2217 − 0.7142i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
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