Poem fractal

A Song of Five

by Nora Hopper Chesson

2 January 1871 to 14 April 1906 (~35)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“If custom fell a-weeping, poor wench, ’twere pity of our lives.”

Affectionately personifying custom as something neglected at our own loss · Essay, Christmas Customs, English Illustrated Magazine, 1899

More remarks (33)

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. Samuel Taylor Coleridge · −0.1579 + 0.8486i · 0.044 away · Compare side by side
  2. John Keats · −0.1602 + 0.8259i · 0.049 away · Compare side by side
  3. William Wordsworth · −0.1831 + 0.7910i · 0.063 away · Compare side by side
  4. Ralph Waldo Emerson · −0.2570 + 0.8112i · 0.068 away · Compare side by side
  5. Dylan Thomas · −0.2210 + 0.7833i · 0.071 away · Compare side by side
—
—
0:00
0:00
Track 1
Skip to main content