Poem fractal

To a Lady Asking Foolish Questions

by Ernest Dowson

2 August 1867 to 23 February 1900 (~33)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The conclusion of the whole matter — a striving and a striving and an ending in nothing.”

An early expression of the pessimism that would remain closely associated with Dowson's outlook · 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. Hartley Coleridge · 0.2873 + 0.5923i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  2. Walt Whitman · 0.2844 + 0.6260i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
  3. Christina Rossetti · 0.2572 + 0.6388i · 0.039 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edna St. Vincent Millay · 0.2276 + 0.5899i · 0.041 away · Compare side by side
  5. William Shakespeare · 0.2885 + 0.6377i · 0.043 away · Compare side by side
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