Poem fractal

Ghosts

by Joseph Campbell

15 July 1879 to 6 June 1944 (~65)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“And mixed up with the twilight and silence is a profound melancholy that rises out of the landscape itself, or is read into it by the greyness of one’s own experience.”

Recognising how landscape and personal emotion can become impossible to separate · Mearing Stones, Twilight and Silence

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. Stephen Phillips · −0.4911 − 0.8400i · 0.009 away · Compare side by side
  2. Thomas Hardy · −0.5008 − 0.8589i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  3. William Watson · −0.5175 − 0.8446i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edward Thomas · −0.4737 − 0.8414i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  5. Thomas Hood · −0.5282 − 0.8230i · 0.038 away · Compare side by side
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