Poem fractal

The Song

by Humbert Wolfe

5 January 1885 to 5 January 1940 (~55)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“You can always tell a real friend: when you've made a fool of yourself he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job.”

Friendship is shown by forgiving embarrassment rather than defining someone by a single foolish moment · Epigram, commonly attributed to Humbert Wolfe

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 Dickinson · 0.3709 − 0.7927i · 0.015 away · Compare side by side
  2. Amelia Alderson Opie · 0.3364 − 0.7660i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
  3. John Sheffield · 0.3328 − 0.8152i · 0.037 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edna St. Vincent Millay · 0.3201 − 0.8015i · 0.039 away · Compare side by side
  5. Watcyn Wyn · 0.3540 − 0.7337i · 0.054 away · Compare side by side
—
—
0:00
0:00
Track 1
Skip to main content