Poem fractal

Sweet Power of Song

by Joanna Baillie

11 September 1762 to 23 February 1851 (~89)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Sending a poem is just the very way to have the whole matter considered by the sober pot-boilers over the whole kingdom as a fanciful and visionary thing.”

She preferred a plain prose plan to verse when campaigning for chimney-sweeps · Letter to James Montgomery, 5 February 1824

More remarks (20)

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. James Russell Lowell · −0.5251 − 0.4965i · 0.003 away · Compare side by side
  2. Dylan Thomas · −0.5065 − 0.4942i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  3. William Makepeace Thackeray · −0.5057 − 0.5016i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  4. Arthur O'Shaughnessy · −0.5264 − 0.5140i · 0.020 away · Compare side by side
  5. John McCrae · −0.5007 − 0.4896i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
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