Poem fractal

Prayer Before Birth

by Louis MacNeice

12 September 1907 to 3 September 1963 (~56)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The writer today should be not so much the mouthpiece of a community as its conscience, its critical faculty, its generous instinct.”

The poet should disturb what a public already knows, not echo it · Preface, Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (1938)

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. Thomas Godfrey · −0.2441 + 0.0636i · 0.015 away · Compare side by side
  2. Nora Hopper Chesson · −0.2733 + 0.0692i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  3. Ella Wheeler Wilcox · −0.2654 + 0.0956i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  4. Nora Hopper Chesson · −0.2284 + 0.0854i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  5. Thomas Paine · −0.2798 + 0.0717i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
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