Poem fractal

De Amore

by Ernest Dowson

2 August 1867 to 23 February 1900 (~33)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I am afraid, my dear, I am being driven to Rome in self-defence. Vulgarity, sentimentality, crudity: isn't there an effectual protest against it all?”

Expressing the aesthetic and intellectual impulses drawing Dowson towards Roman Catholicism · Letter to Arthur Moore, May 1891

More remarks (40)

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. Siegfried Sassoon · −0.2747 + 0.2272i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  2. George Crabbe · −0.2531 + 0.1858i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  3. James Nack · −0.2845 + 0.2258i · 0.027 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edna St. Vincent Millay · −0.2794 + 0.1733i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
  5. Christina Rossetti · −0.3049 + 0.1924i · 0.032 away · Compare side by side
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