Poem fractal

A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed

by Jonathan Swift

30 November 1667 to 19 October 1745 (~78)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“May you live all the days of your life.”

A concise blessing for fully inhabiting the time one is given · Prose aphorism, Thoughts on Various Subjects (1711)

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. John Donne · −0.5618 + 0.9485i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
  2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge · −0.5579 + 0.9712i · 0.053 away · Compare side by side
  3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge · −0.5310 + 0.8706i · 0.058 away · Compare side by side
  4. John Donne · −0.6202 + 0.8946i · 0.060 away · Compare side by side
  5. Anna Hempstead Branch · −0.5020 + 0.8874i · 0.070 away · Compare side by side
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