Poem fractal

Wonder

by Thomas Traherne

c. 1637 to 27 September 1674 (~37)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting.”

Expressing the child’s sense of nature as timeless, newly discovered, and beyond ordinary human ownership · Centuries of Meditations

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. Francis Ledwidge · −0.2276 − 0.2146i · 0.015 away · Compare side by side
  2. Amelia Alderson Opie · −0.2375 − 0.2092i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  3. Violet Fane · −0.1969 − 0.1921i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  4. Lord Byron · −0.2072 − 0.1832i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
  5. George Eliot · −0.2300 − 0.1832i · 0.027 away · Compare side by side
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