Poem fractal

Friends Old and New

by Edgar A. Guest

20 August 1881 to 5 August 1959 (~78)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“He who spends money on a little child is investing it to real purpose; and the dividends it pays in pride and happiness and contentment are beyond computation.”

Valuing care for children above any measurable financial return · 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. John Drinkwater · 0.1240 − 0.5920i · 0.015 away · Compare side by side
  2. Emily Dickinson · 0.1566 − 0.5671i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  3. Charles Lamb · 0.1396 − 0.6101i · 0.027 away · Compare side by side
  4. William Soutar · 0.1542 − 0.5574i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
  5. Robert Browning · 0.1676 − 0.5796i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
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