Poem fractal

Merlin's Song

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

25 May 1803 to 27 April 1882 (~79)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation.”

Urges the development of one's distinctive capacities rather than imitation · Essay, Self-Reliance (1841)

More remarks (85)

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. J.G. Holland · −0.3138 + 0.5813i · 0.009 away · Compare side by side
  2. Christina Rossetti · −0.3118 + 0.5832i · 0.011 away · Compare side by side
  3. Algernon Charles Swinburne · −0.3446 + 0.5765i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  4. Lord Byron · −0.3035 + 0.5443i · 0.033 away · Compare side by side
  5. George Cabot Lodge · −0.3055 + 0.6084i · 0.037 away · Compare side by side
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