Poem fractal

Friendship’s Mystery, To my Dearest Lucasia

by Katherine Philips

1 January 1632 to 22 June 1664 (~32)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I find too there are few Friendships in the World Marriage-Proof; especially when the Person our Friend marries has not a Soul particularly capable of the Tenderness of that Endearment. We may generally conclude the Marriage of a Friend to be the Funeral of a Friendship.”

Reflecting the fragility of even the closest bonds when marriage intervenes · Letter to Sir Charles Cotterell, 1662

More remarks (1)

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. Robert Burns · 0.1410 − 0.5304i · 0.003 away · Compare side by side
  2. Charles Mackay · 0.1405 − 0.5221i · 0.011 away · Compare side by side
  3. Ernest Dowson · 0.1261 − 0.5386i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  4. Alice Meynell · 0.1561 − 0.5372i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  5. Robert Herrick · 0.1330 − 0.5174i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
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