Poem fractal

Sunrise on the Coast

by Banjo Paterson

17 February 1864 to 5 February 1941 (~77)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“In private life he was just a hard-working commonsense, level-headed man, without any redeeming vices, less of a quack, less of a showman, and less of a time-server than any public man I ever met.”

Praising Kipling's disciplined character while gently mocking conventional celebrity · Published reminiscence of Rudyard Kipling

More remarks (19)

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. Eva Gore-Booth · −0.6105 + 0.2732i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  2. William Butler Yeats · −0.5910 + 0.3054i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  3. Tobias George Smollett · −0.6470 + 0.3113i · 0.044 away · Compare side by side
  4. Patrick Reginald Chalmers · −0.6503 + 0.2660i · 0.049 away · Compare side by side
  5. D. H. Lawrence · −0.5554 + 0.3047i · 0.054 away · Compare side by side
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