Poem fractal

Christian Settlements in Africa

by Lydia Huntley Sigourney

1 September 1791 to 10 June 1865 (~74)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“My mind was made up never to leave my parents. I felt that their absorbing love could never be repaid by the longest life-service.”

Explaining her decision to prioritise filial duty over marriage in her youth · Autobiography, Letters of Life

More remarks (2)

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. Amelia Alderson Opie · −0.7990 + 0.3490i · 0.034 away · Compare side by side
  2. Ralph Waldo Emerson · −0.7776 + 0.3534i · 0.053 away · Compare side by side
  3. Gerard Manley Hopkins · −0.7985 + 0.2444i · 0.084 away · Compare side by side
  4. Robert Browning · −0.6945 + 0.3675i · 0.135 away · Compare side by side
  5. Edgar Allan Poe · −0.7473 + 0.2006i · 0.146 away · Compare side by side
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