Poem fractal

Despair

by Ada Cambridge

21 November 1844 to 19 July 1926 (~82)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The dear world in every part is Home to the spirit that loves life and freedom, and discerns no frontiers between nation and nation, nor barriers between man and man.”

A generous late-life vision of human belonging beyond national boundaries · 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. Philip Bourke Marston · −0.0559 + 0.1618i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  2. Sir Thomas More · −0.0701 + 0.1414i · 0.015 away · Compare side by side
  3. Phineas Fletcher · −0.0736 + 0.1599i · 0.020 away · Compare side by side
  4. Thomas Hood · −0.0423 + 0.1324i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  5. Thomas Moore · −0.0599 + 0.1717i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
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