Poem fractal

The Wind Over the Chimney

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

27 February 1807 to 24 March 1882 (~75)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The human voice is the organ of the soul; the organs of the body are merely instruments.”

Linking speech with inner life and treating the body as its expressive instrument · Prose fiction

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. Herman Melville · −0.3970 − 0.6538i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  2. Oscar Wilde · −0.3844 − 0.6401i · 0.020 away · Compare side by side
  3. Patrick Reginald Chalmers · −0.4265 − 0.6496i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  4. George Darley · −0.4291 − 0.6525i · 0.027 away · Compare side by side
  5. T. S. Eliot · −0.4158 − 0.6673i · 0.027 away · Compare side by side
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