Poem fractal

Tied Down

by Edgar A. Guest

20 August 1881 to 5 August 1959 (~78)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Dreams are free, and in their flights of fancy young folks may be as extravagant as they wish.”

Celebrating the unrestricted imaginative hopes of youth · 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. Alfred Austin · 0.4311 − 0.2965i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  2. Richard Crashaw · 0.4169 − 0.2604i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
  3. Elizabeth Prentiss · 0.3986 − 0.2795i · 0.038 away · Compare side by side
  4. Arthur Hugh Clough · 0.4593 − 0.3100i · 0.042 away · Compare side by side
  5. George Herbert · 0.4595 − 0.2255i · 0.054 away · Compare side by side
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