Poem fractal

Hand in Hand

by Edgar A. Guest

20 August 1881 to 5 August 1959 (~78)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“We have been building a home for the last fifteen years, but it begins to look now as though it will not be finished for many years to come.”

Presenting home as something created gradually through shared life rather than construction alone · 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. William Blake · −0.3026 − 0.7344i · 0.005 away · Compare side by side
  2. Edgar Allan Poe · −0.3037 − 0.7261i · 0.012 away · Compare side by side
  3. Richard · −0.3038 − 0.7554i · 0.017 away · Compare side by side
  4. Thomas Hood · −0.3256 − 0.7224i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  5. A.E.Housman · −0.3151 − 0.7644i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
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