Poem fractal

The Poet and His Song

by Paul Laurence Dunbar

27 June 1872 to 9 February 1906 (~34)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“It is a little dark still, but there are warnings of the day and somewhere out of the darkness a bird is singing to the Dawn.”

Expressing cautious hope amid the shadows of racial struggle · Essay, Representative American Negroes, 1903

More remarks (10)

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. Arthur Hugh Clough · −0.2022 − 0.3428i · 0.007 away · Compare side by side
  2. Charles Mackay · −0.2146 − 0.3473i · 0.009 away · Compare side by side
  3. George Herbert · −0.2070 − 0.3393i · 0.009 away · Compare side by side
  4. James Stephens · −0.2100 − 0.3384i · 0.011 away · Compare side by side
  5. Robert Nichols · −0.2166 − 0.3505i · 0.011 away · Compare side by side
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