Poem fractal

Too Near

by Philip Bourke Marston

13 August 1850 to 13 February 1887 (~37)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“It seems to me this perfect poem is possessed by the melancholy yet tender music of winds sighing at twilight, in some churchyard, through old trees that watch beside silent graves.”

Describing how poetry can fuse sound, atmosphere, nature and melancholy · Letter to Louise Chandler Moulton, quoted in Representative Women of New England

More remarks (9)

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. Jean Elliot · 0.4365 + 0.2072i · 0.060 away · Compare side by side
  2. Thomas, Lord Vaux · 0.4587 + 0.1061i · 0.062 away · Compare side by side
  3. John Donne · 0.4652 + 0.1045i · 0.068 away · Compare side by side
  4. Francis Pilkington · 0.3442 + 0.1361i · 0.073 away · Compare side by side
  5. John Donne · 0.4879 + 0.1393i · 0.073 away · Compare side by side
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