Poem fractal

Quand vous serez bien vieille

by Pierre de Ronsard

11 September 1524 to 27 December 1585 (~61)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“It is no vice to amend oneself, but it is extreme malice to persist in one's fault.”

Original: Car ce n'est pas vice de s'amender, mais c'est extrême malice de persister en son peché. — Revision treated as a moral duty of the writer · Preface to the second edition of La Franciade (French)

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. Nora Hopper Chesson · 0.8877 + 0.0262i · 0.049 away · Compare side by side
  2. Gaius Valerius Catullus · 0.8668 + 0.0379i · 0.059 away · Compare side by side
  3. Raymond Garfield Dandridge · 0.8351 + 0.1231i · 0.103 away · Compare side by side
  4. D. H. Lawrence · 0.9537 + 0.1902i · 0.131 away · Compare side by side
  5. Charles Baudelaire · 0.7876 + 0.0365i · 0.135 away · Compare side by side
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