Poem fractal

You Make Me Think of Lavender

by Ford Madox Hueffer

17 December 1873 to 26 June 1939 (~66)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.”

Ford’s celebrated test for judging a book from a representative page · Critical maxim, commonly attributed

More remarks (36)

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. Charles Baudelaire · −0.2356 + 0.1465i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge · −0.2309 + 0.1734i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  3. Wilfrid Wilson Gibson · −0.2639 + 0.1523i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edgar Lee Masters · −0.2200 + 0.1728i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  5. Philip Bourke Marston · −0.2209 + 0.1744i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
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