Poem fractal

Evelyn Hope

by Robert Browning

7 May 1812 to 12 December 1889 (~77)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The musician speaks on the note he sings with; there is no change in the scale, as he diminishes the volume into familiar intercourse.”

On the sincerity that should carry from a poet's grand work into his ordinary voice · Essay on Shelley, preface to the spurious Shelley letters, 1851

More remarks (16)

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. Anne Whitney · 0.3439 + 0.0269i · 0.008 away · Compare side by side
  2. Amy Lowell · 0.3234 + 0.0294i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  3. Arthur O'Shaughnessy · 0.3257 + 0.0331i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  4. J.G. Holland · 0.3391 + 0.0053i · 0.017 away · Compare side by side
  5. Ella Wheeler Wilcox · 0.3379 + 0.0571i · 0.035 away · Compare side by side
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