Poem fractal

Saw Ye Johnny Comin

by Joanna Baillie

11 September 1762 to 23 February 1851 (~89)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“No Christian—no Protestant Christian, regulates, or at least ought to regulate, his faith by any thing but what appears to him to be really taught in Scripture.”

Private judgement of scripture set above added church doctrines · A View of the General Tenor of the New Testament, 1831

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 Edwin Campbell · 0.6564 − 0.3903i · 0.051 away · Compare side by side
  2. Christina Rossetti · 0.6692 − 0.4836i · 0.067 away · Compare side by side
  3. Richard · 0.5637 − 0.4655i · 0.071 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edna St. Vincent Millay · 0.5616 − 0.3999i · 0.072 away · Compare side by side
  5. Richard · 0.5507 − 0.4379i · 0.076 away · Compare side by side
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