Poem fractal

A Quest

by Louise Chandler Moulton

10 April 1835 to 10 August 1908 (~73)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I was lonely, and I sought companions. What was there to do but to create them?”

On the imagination’s power to supply what isolation withholds · Conversation or recollection, as commonly reported

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. Thomas Weelkes · −0.3153 − 0.9523i · 0.009 away · Compare side by side
  2. Thomas Hardy · −0.3404 − 0.9499i · 0.020 away · Compare side by side
  3. Hilda Doolittle · −0.3288 − 0.9344i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
  4. Elinor Wylie · −0.3522 − 0.9566i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
  5. Emily Dickinson · −0.3572 − 0.9803i · 0.042 away · Compare side by side
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