Poem fractal

To a Nightingale

by Charlotte Smith

4 May 1749 to 28 October 1806 (~57)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The indulgence with which the public has received these poems has encouraged the author to offer them again.”

Showing how readership sustained her continuing literary work · Preface to Elegiac Sonnets

More remarks (4)

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. Thomas Hood · −0.6985 + 0.7338i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  2. Oscar Wilde · −0.6758 + 0.7931i · 0.046 away · Compare side by side
  3. Charles Bertram Johnson · −0.6981 + 0.8052i · 0.055 away · Compare side by side
  4. Percy Bysshe Shelley · −0.7431 + 0.7763i · 0.058 away · Compare side by side
  5. Edna St. Vincent Millay · −0.6577 + 0.7016i · 0.059 away · Compare side by side
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