Poem fractal

Query—A Musician speaks

by Edna Wahlert McCourt

19 July 1887 to 4 January 1963 (~76)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“We were just recollecting how speech in strange tongues came to men in the Bible days.”

Connecting an unexpected gift of speech with an ancient sacred memory · Short story, The Captain and the Miracle (1918)

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. A.E.Housman · −0.3151 − 0.7644i · 0.012 away · Compare side by side
  2. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · −0.3101 − 0.7918i · 0.017 away · Compare side by side
  3. Robert Southey · −0.3267 − 0.7930i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  4. Charles Sorley · −0.3342 − 0.7608i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  5. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · −0.2951 − 0.7756i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
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