Poem fractal

Mother to Son

by Langston Hughes

1 February 1902 to 22 May 1967 (~65)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Negro writers cannot. Ours is a social as well as a literary responsibility.”

Expressing Hughes's sense that writing carries responsibilities beyond aesthetics · Essay, My Adventures as a Social Poet

More remarks (92)

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. Nora Hopper Chesson · −0.1723 + 0.3477i · 0.004 away · Compare side by side
  2. Thomas Carew · −0.1848 + 0.3558i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  3. D. H. Lawrence · −0.1595 + 0.3427i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  4. James Elroy Flecker · −0.1859 + 0.3756i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
  5. William Butler Yeats · −0.1937 + 0.3245i · 0.034 away · Compare side by side
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