Poem fractal

Desire

by Ada Cambridge

21 November 1844 to 19 July 1926 (~82)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“We never minded these little things, holding the view that a good servant was a good servant, and that her religion was her own business.”

A matter-of-fact statement of religious tolerance in everyday life · Memoir, Thirty Years in Australia (1903)

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. Hart Crane · −0.4126 + 0.1570i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  2. King James Bible · −0.3972 + 0.1275i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge · −0.3966 + 0.1249i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  4. Matthew Arnold · −0.3831 + 0.1354i · 0.029 away · Compare side by side
  5. Hartley Coleridge · −0.3855 + 0.1235i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
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