Poem fractal

Dance of the Macabre Mice

by Wallace Stevens

2 October 1879 to 2 August 1955 (~76)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“God is in me or else is not at all.”

Locates divinity, if anywhere, inside the person rather than beyond · Adagia, notebook aphorisms

More remarks (40)

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. William Shakespeare · 0.3597 + 0.2635i · 0.015 away · Compare side by side
  2. George Peele · 0.3185 + 0.2777i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
  3. Sir Philip Sidney · 0.3488 + 0.3059i · 0.033 away · Compare side by side
  4. D. H. Lawrence · 0.3514 + 0.2391i · 0.034 away · Compare side by side
  5. Marianne Moore · 0.3909 + 0.3032i · 0.052 away · Compare side by side
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