Poem fractal

Sunset

by Edgar A. Guest

20 August 1881 to 5 August 1959 (~78)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“There is no pleasanter sight within the front door of any man's castle than the strewn and disordered evidences that children there abide.”

Finding warmth and meaning in the ordinary disorder created by family life · 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. Ralph Waldo Emerson · −0.1121 − 0.3883i · 0.009 away · Compare side by side
  2. William Schwenck Gilbert · −0.1277 − 0.3906i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  3. William Wordsworth · −0.0921 − 0.3808i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
  4. Thomas Stanley · −0.0836 − 0.4080i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
  5. John Clare · −0.0843 − 0.3733i · 0.035 away · Compare side by side
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