Poem fractal

Myself

by Edgar A. Guest

20 August 1881 to 5 August 1959 (~78)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The home is not yet completed. We still cherish our dreams of what it is to be.”

Treating home and family life as continuing works shaped by hope and change · Prose memoir, 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. John Fletcher · −0.2025 − 0.2922i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  2. Now
    Dylan Thomas · −0.2072 − 0.2951i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
  3. Nora Hopper Chesson · −0.2176 − 0.2903i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
  4. Elizabeth Thomas · −0.1574 − 0.2714i · 0.032 away · Compare side by side
  5. Lord Byron · −0.1631 − 0.2589i · 0.033 away · Compare side by side
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