Poem fractal

There Is No God

by Arthur Hugh Clough

1 January 1819 to 13 November 1861 (~42)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“And simple enjoyments are, if not the most voluptuous and delicately refined, assuredly the manliest and healthiest, the most honest and rational and permanent.”

Defending modest pleasures as more enduring and honourable than ostentation · Essay on retrenchment during the Irish Famine, 1847

More remarks (7)

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. Robert Burns · −0.1948 − 0.7089i · 0.006 away · Compare side by side
  2. Frances E. W. Harper · −0.1880 − 0.7196i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  3. Henry Vaughan · −0.2007 − 0.7214i · 0.020 away · Compare side by side
  4. Phoebe Cary · −0.1800 − 0.6863i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  5. Emily Dickinson · −0.2011 − 0.7219i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
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