Poem fractal

On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in a Book

by Charles Tennyson Turner

4 July 1808 to 25 April 1879 (~71)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“You cannot well say a thing ‘sounds’ the ocean, except a plummet; or ‘sounds the harp,’ except the fingers of a musician.”

Using wit to distinguish vivid metaphor from confusing usage · Letter to Hardwicke Rawnsley, 1872

More remarks (39)

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. William Shakespeare · 0.2885 + 0.6377i · 0.009 away · Compare side by side
  2. Walt Whitman · 0.2844 + 0.6260i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  3. Christina Rossetti · 0.2572 + 0.6388i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  4. William Wordsworth · 0.2946 + 0.6783i · 0.037 away · Compare side by side
  5. Ernest Dowson · 0.2667 + 0.6011i · 0.045 away · Compare side by side
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