Poem fractal

Walls

by Eva Gore-Booth

22 May 1870 to 30 June 1926 (~56)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“One sometimes thinks that the whole art of party politics is to dress shop windows with beautiful motives and noble aims so as to take in the public and keep them quiet while they are carrying out wholesale robberies and murders in the safe seclusion of Government Offices and Departments.”

A sharp critique of how political rhetoric conceals violence and self-interest · Political essay or manuscript

More remarks (2)

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. Banjo Paterson · −0.6078 + 0.2908i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  2. William Butler Yeats · −0.5910 + 0.3054i · 0.038 away · Compare side by side
  3. Patrick Reginald Chalmers · −0.6503 + 0.2660i · 0.040 away · Compare side by side
  4. Vachel Lindsay · −0.5875 + 0.2393i · 0.041 away · Compare side by side
  5. Tobias George Smollett · −0.6470 + 0.3113i · 0.053 away · Compare side by side
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