Poem fractal

Python

by Grace Hazard Conkling

7 February 1878 to 15 November 1958 (~80)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I don't mean to be sentimental about children, I want to be just. But I do believe that beauty is often real to them when we cannot see it, because they have not yet had time to get tired of anything.”

On children's fresh capacity to perceive beauty · Talk, Imagination and Children's Reading (1920)

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. Emily Dickinson · −0.2493 − 1.0118i · 0.005 away · Compare side by side
  2. Katharine Tynan Hinkson · −0.2420 − 0.9867i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  3. Bliss Carman · −0.2733 − 0.9953i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edward Thomas · −0.2219 − 0.9837i · 0.037 away · Compare side by side
  5. Edna St. Vincent Millay · −0.2471 − 1.0444i · 0.037 away · Compare side by side
—
—
0:00
0:00
Track 1
Skip to main content