Poem fractal

Promise

by Paul Laurence Dunbar

27 June 1872 to 9 February 1906 (~34)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I believe I know my own people pretty thoroughly. I know them all classes, the high and the low, and have yet to see any young man or young woman who had the spirit of work in them before, driven from labor by a college education.”

Defending the value of learning against claims it unfits people for work · Essay on higher education for African Americans

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. James Clarence Mangan · −0.3378 + 0.2390i · 0.010 away · Compare side by side
  2. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · −0.3664 + 0.2369i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  3. Philip Bourke Marston · −0.3224 + 0.2484i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  4. Patrick Reginald Chalmers · −0.3477 + 0.2692i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  5. Charles Bertram Johnson · −0.3246 + 0.2282i · 0.027 away · Compare side by side
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