Poem fractal

Love After Death

by Arthur O'Shaughnessy

14 March 1844 to 30 January 1881 (~37)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Love appears to me, indeed, as the offer of heaven.”

From a long, unusually candid letter in which he set out his philosophy of love as a redemptive, almost sacred force rather than mere sentiment · Letter to Helen Snee, 22 May 1870

More remarks (15)

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. William Shakespeare · −0.0955 + 0.6862i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  2. William Wordsworth · −0.0953 + 0.7020i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  3. William Ellery Leonard · −0.0842 + 0.6665i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edna St. Vincent Millay · −0.0590 + 0.6644i · 0.034 away · Compare side by side
  5. Paul Laurence Dunbar · −0.0472 + 0.7094i · 0.038 away · Compare side by side
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