Poem fractal

On the Nature of Love

by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

17 August 1840 to 10 September 1922 (~82)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I do not love civilised humanity; and poor savage human nature seems a lost cause.”

A severe expression of his growing pessimism about civilisation and human nature · Diary, 13 October 1889

More remarks (39)

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. Edmund Spenser · 0.5336 + 0.6601i · 0.054 away · Compare side by side
  2. Charles Baudelaire · 0.6119 + 0.5722i · 0.066 away · Compare side by side
  3. William Byrd · 0.5259 + 0.5353i · 0.085 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edmund Spenser · 0.6015 + 0.6883i · 0.086 away · Compare side by side
  5. Thomas MacDonagh · 0.4681 + 0.6430i · 0.096 away · Compare side by side
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