Poem fractal

The World's Desire

by Nora Hopper Chesson

2 January 1871 to 14 April 1906 (~35)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Let us not lend silver or pay gold away on this day of the days.”

Preserving an old belief about safeguarding prosperity on Christmas Day · 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. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. · −0.5273 + 0.1322i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  2. Alfred Austin · −0.5422 + 0.0998i · 0.029 away · Compare side by side
  3. John Lyly · −0.5488 + 0.1617i · 0.033 away · Compare side by side
  4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge · −0.5136 + 0.1119i · 0.036 away · Compare side by side
  5. Alfred Douglas · −0.5111 + 0.1035i · 0.042 away · Compare side by side
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