Poem fractal

November Night

by Adelaide Crapsey

9 September 1878 to 8 October 1914 (~36)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Don't be disturbed if you don't know much what prosody is. Hardly anyone does.”

A dry scholar's joke about the obscurity of the science she treated as her life's work · Letter to her parents

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. Ernest Hemingway · −1.2946 − 0.6425i · 0.075 away · Compare side by side
  2. Sadakichi Hartmann · −1.1761 − 0.6385i · 0.184 away · Compare side by side
  3. Age
    William Bell Scott · −1.1026 − 0.6588i · 0.260 away · Compare side by side
  4. Anonymous · −1.1241 − 0.3966i · 0.306 away · Compare side by side
  5. Patrick Reginald Chalmers · −1.0532 − 0.6533i · 0.307 away · Compare side by side
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