Poem fractal

The Dead Child

by Ernest Dowson

2 August 1867 to 23 February 1900 (~33)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“A man may long for water in Sahara, but he doesn't always get it.”

A concise rebuttal of the idea that human longing proves the existence of what is longed for · Marginalia on Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, c. 1889

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. Countee Cullen · 0.1526 − 1.2177i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
  2. Emily Dickinson · 0.1973 − 1.1866i · 0.032 away · Compare side by side
  3. Emily Dickinson · 0.1604 − 1.2464i · 0.038 away · Compare side by side
  4. Emily Dickinson · 0.1397 − 1.2200i · 0.041 away · Compare side by side
  5. William Blake · 0.1844 − 1.1704i · 0.043 away · Compare side by side
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