Poem fractal

The Stick-Together Families

by Edgar A. Guest

20 August 1881 to 5 August 1959 (~78)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“There is always a way out of the difficulties. Even though we cannot see or guess what that way is to be, it will be provided.”

Expressing trust that unseen possibilities remain during hardship · Autobiographical essay, Making the House a Home, 1922

More remarks (25)

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. Banjo Paterson · −0.2296 + 1.3636i · 0.007 away · Compare side by side
  2. Alan Seeger · −0.1874 + 1.3684i · 0.037 away · Compare side by side
  3. Thomas Hardy · −0.1817 + 1.3202i · 0.064 away · Compare side by side
  4. Rudyard Kipling · −0.1873 + 1.4350i · 0.077 away · Compare side by side
  5. Abraham Cowley · −0.2638 + 1.4398i · 0.082 away · Compare side by side
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