Poem fractal

A Cameo

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

5 April 1837 to 10 April 1909 (~72)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“A great poet can perfect his picture with strangely few touches.”

Praising economy and precision in poetic depiction · Essay, Victor Hugo: L'Homme qui Rit

More remarks (54)

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. Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton · −0.6044 + 0.8449i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  2. Ralph Waldo Emerson · −0.5911 + 0.7789i · 0.049 away · Compare side by side
  3. William Wordsworth · −0.6352 + 0.7759i · 0.053 away · Compare side by side
  4. Alfred Austin · −0.5574 + 0.8461i · 0.059 away · Compare side by side
  5. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · −0.5985 + 0.7648i · 0.060 away · Compare side by side
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