Poem fractal

The Lost Leader

by Robert Browning

7 May 1812 to 12 December 1889 (~77)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I believe the fault comes from a too-sweet sense of the freedom of being true with you, telling you all, hiding nothing.”

Connecting intimacy with the freedom to speak without concealment · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 15 June 1846

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. D. H. Lawrence · −0.2620 + 1.0644i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  2. Matthew Arnold · −0.2253 + 1.0434i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
  3. Walter Savage Landor · −0.2098 + 1.0867i · 0.036 away · Compare side by side
  4. Thomas Shadwell · −0.2413 + 1.0275i · 0.042 away · Compare side by side
  5. T. S. Eliot · −0.2579 + 1.0263i · 0.046 away · Compare side by side
—
—
0:00
0:00
Track 1
Skip to main content