Poem fractal

Wild Honey

by Maurice Thompson

9 September 1844 to 15 February 1901 (~57)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I have been forced to conclude that a good part of bird-song is the mechanical response to what may be called hereditary memory.”

Melody treated as inheritance as much as invention · Essay, The Motif of Bird-Song, in Sylvan Secrets

More remarks (18)

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. Emily Brontë · −0.5855 − 0.6643i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  2. Emily Dickinson · −0.5658 − 0.6934i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  3. G. K. Chesterton · −0.5845 − 0.6606i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  4. J.M. Synge · −0.5636 − 0.6650i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
  5. Emily Dickinson · −0.5542 − 0.6674i · 0.035 away · Compare side by side
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