Poem fractal

Le Papillon

by Alphonse de Lamartine

21 October 1790 to 1 March 1869 (~79)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The world is a book of which every step opens a new page.”

Original: Le monde est un livre dont chaque pas nous ouvre une page. — Frames travel and experience as a continuous reading of reality, each movement revealing further meaning. · Voyage en Orient, 1835 (French)

More remarks (13)

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. Charles Baudelaire · 0.6119 + 0.5722i · 0.058 away · Compare side by side
  2. William Byrd · 0.5259 + 0.5353i · 0.087 away · Compare side by side
  3. Rudyard Kipling · 0.6928 + 0.4806i · 0.089 away · Compare side by side
  4. Nora Hopper Chesson · 0.7049 + 0.4665i · 0.106 away · Compare side by side
  5. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt · 0.5598 + 0.6134i · 0.111 away · Compare side by side
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