Poem fractal

Home Thoughts, From Abroad

by Robert Browning

7 May 1812 to 12 December 1889 (~77)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“An instructed eye loves to see where the brush has dipped twice in a lustrous colour, has lain insistingly along a favourite outline, dwelt lovingly in a grand shadow.”

Arguing that apparent excess can reveal the individual choices and pleasures of an artist · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 13 January 1845

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. Fenton Johnson · −0.6406 + 0.3659i · 0.054 away · Compare side by side
  2. John Gillespie Magee Jr. · −0.6746 + 0.3085i · 0.062 away · Compare side by side
  3. Joseph Addison · −0.6302 + 0.3568i · 0.065 away · Compare side by side
  4. Tobias George Smollett · −0.6470 + 0.3113i · 0.074 away · Compare side by side
  5. D. H. Lawrence · −0.6563 + 0.4405i · 0.082 away · Compare side by side
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