Poem fractal

Rewards

by Arthur Symons

28 February 1865 to 22 January 1945 (~80)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Unfortunately, words can convey facts; unfortunately, people in general have an ill-regulated but insatiable appetite for facts.”

His dry complaint about the reading public's hunger for mere fact over art · Introduction, Studies in Prose and Verse

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. Edward Thomas · 0.5493 − 0.5469i · 0.040 away · Compare side by side
  2. Charles Webbe · 0.4688 − 0.5563i · 0.049 away · Compare side by side
  3. Sir Philip Sidney · 0.5590 − 0.5437i · 0.050 away · Compare side by side
  4. William Walsh · 0.4645 − 0.5608i · 0.053 away · Compare side by side
  5. Ernest Hemingway · 0.5314 − 0.5084i · 0.064 away · Compare side by side
—
—
0:00
0:00
Track 1
Skip to main content