Poem fractal

Charon's Song

by Charles Murray

27 September 1864 to 12 April 1941 (~77)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I came to Aberdeen, a country lad of sixteen with a cockit bonnet and, because it was winter, a big gravit.”

The exile's first city self-portrait, still wearing the country mark · Later recollection of arriving as an apprentice

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. Richard · −0.4894 − 0.2305i · 0.009 away · Compare side by side
  2. Hart Crane · −0.5009 − 0.2081i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  3. Richard · −0.5037 − 0.1987i · 0.027 away · Compare side by side
  4. Grace Fallow Norton · −0.5220 − 0.2429i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
  5. Harold Monro · −0.5072 − 0.2555i · 0.032 away · Compare side by side
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