Poem fractal

What Will They Do?

by Edward Thomas

3 March 1878 to 9 April 1917 (~39)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The country is not a place to escape to, but a place to live in.”

Emphasizing rural life as an inhabited reality rather than a romantic retreat · Prose essays, as commonly attributed

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. Hart Crane · −0.2625 + 0.5122i · 0.012 away · Compare side by side
  2. D. H. Lawrence · −0.2684 + 0.5256i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  3. Arthur O'Shaughnessy · −0.2606 + 0.5314i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
  4. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · −0.2710 + 0.5386i · 0.039 away · Compare side by side
  5. Marjorie L. C. Pickthall · −0.2268 + 0.4823i · 0.041 away · Compare side by side
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