Poem fractal

Exchanges

by Ernest Dowson

2 August 1867 to 23 February 1900 (~33)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Passion is waste — takes away from a man's stability, his self-centralization: its action on general culture, aestheticism, philosophy, manysidedness, all that makes life endurable, is ruinous.”

A strikingly severe youthful judgement on passion and its power to disturb intellectual self-possession · 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. Emily Dickinson · 0.2709 − 0.9868i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  2. Emily Dickinson · 0.2945 − 0.9948i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  3. George Reginald Margetson · 0.2783 − 0.9408i · 0.034 away · Compare side by side
  4. Wallace Stevens · 0.3042 − 0.9285i · 0.048 away · Compare side by side
  5. Oscar Wilde · 0.3067 − 1.0212i · 0.051 away · Compare side by side
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