Poem fractal

Bird-Song

by James Edwin Campbell

28 September 1867 to 26 January 1896 (~29)

Browse poets 678

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. Joanna Baillie · 0.6263 − 0.4317i · 0.051 away · Compare side by side
  2. Christina Rossetti · 0.6692 − 0.4836i · 0.094 away · Compare side by side
  3. Robert Wever · 0.6653 − 0.2958i · 0.095 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edna St. Vincent Millay · 0.5616 − 0.3999i · 0.095 away · Compare side by side
  5. Christina Rossetti · 0.6066 − 0.3069i · 0.097 away · Compare side by side
—
—
0:00
0:00
Track 1
Skip to main content