Poem fractal

Nuns fret not

by William Wordsworth

7 April 1770 to 23 April 1850 (~80)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Therefore to create taste is to call forth and bestow power, of which knowledge is the effect.”

Seeing great art as something that develops the audience capable of receiving it · Essay Supplementary to the Preface, 1815

More remarks (44)

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. Edmund Spenser · −0.5338 + 0.7381i · 0.004 away · Compare side by side
  2. Emma Lazarus · −0.5301 + 0.7373i · 0.008 away · Compare side by side
  3. Hartley Coleridge · −0.5495 + 0.7340i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  4. Percy Bysshe Shelley · −0.5357 + 0.7566i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  5. Edna St. Vincent Millay · −0.5610 + 0.7441i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
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