Poem fractal

The Merchant's Tale

by Richard

Poems The salon

Drawing the boundary…

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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. George Marion McClellan · 0.2225 − 0.5240i · 0.008 away · Compare side by side
  2. Dylan Thomas · 0.2078 − 0.5297i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  3. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt · 0.2124 − 0.5447i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  4. Sir Henry Taylor · 0.2080 − 0.5526i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  5. Emily Dickinson · 0.1925 − 0.5338i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
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