OBJETIVOS ESPECÍFICOS Y ACCIONES:

line, but the measurement system disregards how many syllables are in a line. Accentual meter is the meter of the earliest Germanic poetry; it is preserved in nursery rhymes and in much comedic lyric verse.

Baa, baa, black sheep, (4) Have you any wool? (5) Yes sir, yes sir, (4) Three bags full; (3) One for the mas-ter, (5)

And one for the lit-tle boy (7) Who lives down the lane. (5)

4. Quantitative Meter, save for some grotesque and rather failed examples, cannot

occur in English, but is the basis of Greek prosody and, later on, of Latin. It measures durational rather than accentual feet (each foot consists of ‘long’ and ‘short’ syllables).

The opening line of the Æneid is a typical line of dactylic hexameter: Armă vĭ | rumquĕ că | nō, Troi | ae quī | prīmŭs ăb | ōrīs

(“I sing of arms and the man, who first from the shores of Troy...”)

In this example, the first and second feet are dactyls; their first syllables, “Ar” and “rum” respectively, contain short vowels, but count as long because the vowels are both followed by two consonants. The third and fourth feet are spondees, the first of which is divided by the main caesura of the verse. The fifth foot is a dactyl, as is nearly always the case. The final foot is a spondee.

The dactylic hexameter was imitated in English by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his poem “Evangeline.” Here is the first stanza:

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like Druids of old, with voices sad and prophetic,

II.

A brief answer: by definition, is a poem a complex system?

What do we find when we put ourselves in the mindset of trying to see lyric poetry as an example of a complex system? How can we distribute language, meter, characters, and so forth into different ‘elements’? Using Paul Cillier’s categories, I have adapted his list to incorporate poetic categories to see if indeed an individual lyric poem “fits” as a complex system.

i. The poem is comprised of a large amount of elements (i.e. stanzas, lines, words, characters; out of the words category many smaller elements appear, like rhyme, emphasis, visual impact, meter, assonance, and so forth).

ii. The elements interact; the lines make up the stanzas and the words make up the lines. Their relationships may change continually as the reader progresses through the poem and puts syntax together that is spread over the course of many lines.

iii. Each element interacts with a large number of other elements: the sound ‘ing’ at the end of the word may be rhymed with or para- rhymed with; it may impact the meaning implied by the sound of the word; some elements are more active than others because, for

example, some vowel sounds are more common or more frequently used.

iv. The interaction between elements is non-linear in that one cannot predict what the emotional value of a poem might be solely by looking at it or examining the technical aspects.

v. Elements (i.e. words, phrases, metaphors, sounds) primarily interact with other elements that are in their near vicinity, however, they can act with other elements that are further away as well

vi. The activity of an element may reflect back on itself (either positive or negative feedback); the subject within a poem might refer to itself or to am image within itself.

vii. The system is open; the borders cannot be drawn; though print poetry is static when on paper, it exists in the poets mind and intention, various readers read and ‘activate’ it; the poem exists within the corpus all poetry that’s been written, and intertextuality is always present.

viii. The system can never be in a state of equilibrium because words change their meaning and connotation. Instead poetry is dynamic and changes over time.

ix. The system is greatly influenced by its history; intertextuality demonstrates this clearly.

x. Individual elements can only act on the available information; readers cannot be influenced by texts they have not encountered in some form or another.

III.

English Translation of Petrarchan Sonnet 159.

From what part of the heavens, from what idea came the example, from which Nature took that beautiful joyful face, in which she chose to show down here what power she has above?

What nymph of the fountain, what goddess of the wood loosed hair of such fine gold on the breeze?

How did a heart gather so much virtue to itself, though the sum of it is guilty of my death? He looks in vain for divine beauty

who has never yet seen how tenderly she moves those eyes of hers around:

he does not know how Love heals, and how he kills, who does not know how sweet her sighs are,

and how sweet her speech, and sweet her smile.

IV.      

The idea of identifying fractals in literature is actually quite mature. For example, Lucy Pollard-Gott, of Yale, has even developed a simple method of fractal identification within single poems. Her method consists of a few simple steps:

In choosing a “root” in a certain poem, Pollard-Gott suggests that one could not only look for an obviously important word, but perhaps choose a sound, phrase, or set of letters that might have significance. Pollard-Gott’s main advice for future researchers is to: “look for some subset of the poem that bears a structural resemblance to the poem as a whole - that is self-similarity.”107