Poem fractal

The British Tars

by Charles Harding Firth

16 March 1857 to 19 February 1936 (~79)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“This implies, as all concentration must, some renunciation, some self-discipline, some restraint of wandering desires; but it brings its reward at once.”

On the cost and payoff of disciplined study · Inaugural lecture, A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History, 1904

More remarks (17)

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. Nora Hopper Chesson · 0.1821 + 0.8724i · 0.008 away · Compare side by side
  2. William Drummond · 0.1392 + 0.8606i · 0.046 away · Compare side by side
  3. Edgar Lee Masters · 0.1336 + 0.8647i · 0.052 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edgar Lee Masters · 0.1335 + 0.8418i · 0.057 away · Compare side by side
  5. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt · 0.1861 + 0.8060i · 0.059 away · Compare side by side
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