Poem fractal

Alone

by Sir Lewis Morris

23 January 1833 to 12 November 1907 (~74)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The only way to make a long poem palatable to modern tastes is to break it up into a number of brief connected episodes.”

Advocating manageable structure for extended poetic narratives · 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. Edward Thomas · −0.1142 + 0.2405i · 0.014 away · Compare side by side
  2. Philip Bourke Marston · −0.1310 + 0.2580i · 0.015 away · Compare side by side
  3. John Donne · −0.0820 + 0.2438i · 0.036 away · Compare side by side
  4. Banjo Paterson · −0.1205 + 0.2179i · 0.036 away · Compare side by side
  5. John Donne · −0.1358 + 0.2228i · 0.037 away · Compare side by side
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