Poem fractal

Perfume

by Arthur Symons

28 February 1865 to 22 January 1945 (~80)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The feast he spreads for us is a very Trimalchio's feast, the heaped profusion, the vaunting prodigality, which brings a surfeit.”

A witty complaint about excess dressed up as abundance · Critical essay on Francis Thompson

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. Emily Dickinson · 0.6268 − 0.6429i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  2. James Joyce · 0.6279 − 0.6287i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
  3. Robert Herrick · 0.6685 − 0.6899i · 0.042 away · Compare side by side
  4. John Clare · 0.6023 − 0.6529i · 0.046 away · Compare side by side
  5. John Keats · 0.5959 − 0.6541i · 0.052 away · Compare side by side
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