Poem fractal

Immolation of a Hindoo Widow

by Letitia Elizabeth Landon

14 August 1802 to 15 October 1838 (~36)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Childhood, more than any other period, links its remembrance with inanimate objects, perhaps because its chief pleasures are derived from them.”

Observing how childhood memories become attached to places and objects · Landoniana, from Romance and Reality

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. Nora Hopper Chesson · −0.3357 − 0.1109i · 0.004 away · Compare side by side
  2. Matthew Arnold · −0.3354 − 0.1208i · 0.012 away · Compare side by side
  3. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · −0.3171 − 0.1122i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  4. John Masefield · −0.3492 − 0.0931i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  5. Ella Wheeler Wilcox · −0.3096 − 0.1162i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
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