Poem fractal

Conscience and Remorse

by Paul Laurence Dunbar

27 June 1872 to 9 February 1906 (~34)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“to interpret my own people through song and story, and to prove to the many that after all we are more human than African.”

Stating his purpose of humanising African American experience through literature · Letter (as commonly attributed)

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. Thomas Weelkes · 0.5003 − 0.6382i · 0.006 away · Compare side by side
  2. James Joyce · 0.4858 − 0.6479i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  3. Edna St. Vincent Millay · 0.4783 − 0.6398i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  4. Sara Teasdale · 0.5057 − 0.6701i · 0.027 away · Compare side by side
  5. Charles Murray · 0.4948 − 0.6858i · 0.043 away · Compare side by side
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