Poem fractal

Two Rivers

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

25 May 1803 to 27 April 1882 (~79)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Every thing is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour, if seen as experience.”

Contrasts the harmony of ideal understanding with the complications of lived experience · Essay, Love (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. D. H. Lawrence · −0.3425 − 0.3227i · 0.011 away · Compare side by side
  2. Anna Lætitia Barbauld · −0.3386 − 0.3252i · 0.012 away · Compare side by side
  3. Christina Rossetti · −0.3341 − 0.3316i · 0.014 away · Compare side by side
  4. Richard · −0.3645 − 0.3315i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  5. Patrick Reginald Chalmers · −0.3628 − 0.3141i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
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