Poem fractal

Craven-Heart

by Ada Cambridge

21 November 1844 to 19 July 1926 (~82)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The notion of making it a pleasure as well as a discipline, of breathing into its dry bones any breath of knowledgeable life, seemed not to occur to anybody.”

Arguing implicitly for learning that is alive, pleasurable and intellectually meaningful · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

More remarks (39)

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. Richard Jago · 0.1946 − 0.6485i · 0.008 away · Compare side by side
  2. Robert Herrick · 0.1738 − 0.6460i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  3. Siegfried Sassoon · 0.2149 − 0.6671i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
  4. Robert Frost · 0.2209 − 0.6530i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
  5. Richard Lovelace · 0.1932 − 0.6267i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
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