Poem fractal

Love's Suicide

by Sir Lewis Morris

23 January 1833 to 12 November 1907 (~74)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The structure of the sonnet gives rise to endless disquisitions and immense displays of useless learning.”

Satirising pedantry about poetic form · Essay, Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry (1891)

More remarks (39)

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 Wordsworth · −0.0678 − 0.0697i · 0.008 away · Compare side by side
  2. Edward Lear · −0.0444 − 0.0758i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  3. Susan Coolidge · −0.0419 − 0.0781i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  4. Thomas Ford · −0.0899 − 0.0631i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
  5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge · −0.0368 − 0.0446i · 0.036 away · Compare side by side
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