Poem fractal

Captain Cook (To My Brother)

by Letitia Elizabeth Landon

14 August 1802 to 15 October 1838 (~36)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Time is the great leveller, but he is also the sanctifier and the beautifier.”

Recognising how time both erases distinctions and transforms memory · Essay, The Criticism of Chateaubriand

More remarks (38)

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. Charlotte Mew · −0.0193 + 0.8399i · 0.009 away · Compare side by side
  2. William Cullen Bryant · −0.0304 + 0.8274i · 0.011 away · Compare side by side
  3. Anonymous · −0.0152 + 0.8173i · 0.015 away · Compare side by side
  4. Leonard Bacon · −0.0168 + 0.8167i · 0.015 away · Compare side by side
  5. Mary Webb · 0.0035 + 0.8016i · 0.038 away · Compare side by side
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