Poem fractal

The Lost Mistress

by Robert Browning

7 May 1812 to 12 December 1889 (~77)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I believe the fault comes from a too-sweet sense of the freedom of being true with you, telling you all, hiding nothing.”

Connecting intimacy with the freedom to speak without concealment · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 15 June 1846

More remarks (16)

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. Maurice Thompson · 0.2051 − 0.3376i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  2. Thomas MacDonagh · 0.1907 − 0.3218i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
  3. Dorothy Parker · 0.2370 − 0.3644i · 0.036 away · Compare side by side
  4. Charlotte Brontë · 0.1922 − 0.3014i · 0.041 away · Compare side by side
  5. James Clarence Mangan · 0.2554 − 0.3047i · 0.045 away · Compare side by side
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