Poem fractal

The Mist

by Carl Sandburg

6 January 1878 to 22 July 1967 (~89)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Life is like an onion; you peel off one layer at a time and sometimes you weep.”

A wry image of experience as gradual, revealing and occasionally painful · Prose remark, commonly attributed to Sandburg

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. Edward Thomas · −0.4737 − 0.8414i · 0.020 away · Compare side by side
  2. Sara Teasdale · −0.4319 − 0.8641i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
  3. Emily Dickinson · −0.4228 − 0.8597i · 0.034 away · Compare side by side
  4. Rudyard Kipling · −0.4343 − 0.8765i · 0.035 away · Compare side by side
  5. Stephen Phillips · −0.4911 − 0.8400i · 0.037 away · Compare side by side
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