Poem fractal

Healing

by Elizabeth Prentiss

26 October 1818 to 13 August 1878 (~60)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Perhaps in the time of our humiliation, when everything seems a failure, we are making the best kind of progress.”

Suggesting that unseen growth may occur precisely when progress seems absent · Letter to a friend in Texas, 1 December 1873

More remarks (30)

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. Richard Crashaw · 0.4169 − 0.2604i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  2. Alfred Austin · 0.4311 − 0.2965i · 0.037 away · Compare side by side
  3. Edgar A. Guest · 0.4365 − 0.2748i · 0.038 away · Compare side by side
  4. James Weldon Johnson · 0.3593 − 0.2683i · 0.041 away · Compare side by side
  5. Pierre de Ronsard · 0.3800 − 0.3162i · 0.041 away · Compare side by side
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