Poem fractal

Phillis is my only Joy

by Sir Charles Sedley

March 1639 to 20 August 1701 (~62)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“As the king has made my daughter a countess, the least I can do, in common gratitude, is to assist in making his Majesty's daughter a queen.”

Famous witty response to James II after the creation of Sedley's daughter as Countess of Dorchester · Conversation (commonly attributed, c. 1688)

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. George Orwell · −0.0060 − 0.6941i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  2. Edna St. Vincent Millay · 0.0031 − 0.6816i · 0.020 away · Compare side by side
  3. Mary Coleridge · −0.0298 − 0.6576i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  4. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · −0.0381 − 0.6629i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  5. Christina Rossetti · 0.0036 − 0.6619i · 0.027 away · Compare side by side
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