Poem fractal

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

by Barnabe Googe

11 June 1540 to February 1594 (~54)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I hear live amongst a sort of Scythians, wanting the comfort of my country, my poor wife and children.”

Expressing the hardship and homesickness of service abroad · Letter from Ireland to Walsingham

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. George Eliot · −0.0806 − 0.4647i · 0.010 away · Compare side by side
  2. Thomas Lovell Beddoes · −0.0573 − 0.4704i · 0.014 away · Compare side by side
  3. Nora Hopper Chesson · −0.0880 − 0.4640i · 0.017 away · Compare side by side
  4. Harold Monro · −0.0747 − 0.4852i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  5. Arthur Macy · −0.0825 − 0.4821i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
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