Poem fractal

How Still the Night

by Joseph Campbell

15 July 1879 to 6 June 1944 (~65)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Then the mood changes, and I feel rising up in me the sorrow that is the dominating passion of my life.”

An unusually candid acknowledgement of the persistent sorrow underlying his sensibility · 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. Alice Cary · −0.3947 − 0.2159i · 0.005 away · Compare side by side
  2. William Cullen Bryant · −0.3836 − 0.2197i · 0.007 away · Compare side by side
  3. Richard Lovelace · −0.3882 − 0.2093i · 0.007 away · Compare side by side
  4. A. A. Milne · −0.3703 − 0.2045i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  5. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. · −0.4120 − 0.2134i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
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