Poem fractal

The Last of the Light Brigade

by Rudyard Kipling

30 December 1865 to 18 January 1936 (~71)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The most extreme distances will be brought within the compass of one week’s travel.”

Remarkably prescient speculation about the shrinking of geographical distance. · Speech, Some Aspects of Travel, 1914

More remarks (152)

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. Alan Seeger · −0.1874 + 1.3684i · 0.067 away · Compare side by side
  2. Abraham Cowley · −0.2638 + 1.4398i · 0.077 away · Compare side by side
  3. Edgar A. Guest · −0.2246 + 1.3680i · 0.077 away · Compare side by side
  4. Banjo Paterson · −0.2296 + 1.3636i · 0.083 away · Compare side by side
  5. W. H. Davies · −0.2892 + 1.4534i · 0.104 away · Compare side by side
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