Poem fractal

Arles

by Charles Murray

27 September 1864 to 12 April 1941 (~77)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Two soldiers throwing Shakespearian quotations at each other from opposite ends of the cabin; a cockney sailor struggling into a clean shirt, quite a rare occurrence with him.”

A surveyor's comic eye for shipboard types before exile began in earnest · Voyage chronicle, outward passage to South Africa

More remarks (4)

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. Sara Teasdale · 0.5057 − 0.6701i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  2. James Joyce · 0.4858 − 0.6479i · 0.039 away · Compare side by side
  3. Paul Laurence Dunbar · 0.5030 − 0.6431i · 0.043 away · Compare side by side
  4. Thomas Weelkes · 0.5003 − 0.6382i · 0.048 away · Compare side by side
  5. Edna St. Vincent Millay · 0.4783 − 0.6398i · 0.049 away · Compare side by side
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