Poem fractal

Youth and Art

by Robert Browning

7 May 1812 to 12 December 1889 (~77)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“My stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study.”

His own summary of what all his poetry was really about · Dedicatory preface to Sordello, addressed to Joseph Milsand, 1863

More remarks (16)

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. Christina Rossetti · 0.1678 − 0.5839i · 0.004 away · Compare side by side
  2. Emily Dickinson · 0.1822 − 0.5862i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  3. Emily Dickinson · 0.1566 − 0.5671i · 0.017 away · Compare side by side
  4. Allan Ramsay · 0.1752 − 0.6040i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  5. William Soutar · 0.1542 − 0.5574i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
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