Poem fractal

The Death-Race

by Robert Stephen Hawker

3 December 1803 to 15 August 1875 (~72)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“What a life mine would be if it were all written and published in a book.”

A wry reflection on the strangeness and richness of his own experiences · Personal remark or letter (as commonly cited)

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. Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan · −0.1073 − 0.1627i · 0.002 away · Compare side by side
  2. Robert Browning · −0.1042 − 0.1495i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  3. Sir Walter Raleigh · −0.1193 − 0.1605i · 0.014 away · Compare side by side
  4. Ralph Waldo Emerson · −0.1219 − 0.1594i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  5. John Clare · −0.1231 − 0.1515i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
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