Poem fractal

After Love

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. Quintus Horatius Flaccus · 0.6925 − 0.8285i · 0.068 away · Compare side by side
  2. Emily Dickinson · 0.6582 − 0.8544i · 0.078 away · Compare side by side
  3. Thomas Hood · 0.6097 − 0.7052i · 0.082 away · Compare side by side
  4. Robert Herrick · 0.6685 − 0.6899i · 0.090 away · Compare side by side
  5. Mina Loy · 0.7405 − 0.7711i · 0.092 away · Compare side by side
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