Poem fractal

On Meeting After

by Arthur Symons

28 February 1865 to 22 January 1945 (~80)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I am always charmed to read beautiful poems about nature in the country. Only, personally, I prefer town to country.”

A frank admission of his urban, artificial sensibility · Preface, defence of Silhouettes

More remarks (31)

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 · 0.2907 − 0.6899i · 0.004 away · Compare side by side
  2. Robert Louis Stevenson · 0.2904 − 0.6936i · 0.007 away · Compare side by side
  3. Langston Hughes · 0.2786 − 0.7151i · 0.029 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edna St. Vincent Millay · 0.3205 − 0.6982i · 0.034 away · Compare side by side
  5. William Ernest Henley · 0.3240 − 0.6819i · 0.036 away · Compare side by side
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