Poem fractal

After Our Likeness

by Ada Cambridge

21 November 1844 to 19 July 1926 (~82)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“When you love a creature, dumb or otherwise, its own happiness is what you consider first.”

Defining love through concern for the happiness of the beloved · Memoir, Thirty Years in Australia (1903)

More remarks (39)

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. Julia Ward Howe · −0.1031 − 0.0231i · 0.006 away · Compare side by side
  2. A. A. Milne · −0.0894 − 0.0286i · 0.010 away · Compare side by side
  3. John Clare · −0.1125 − 0.0187i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  4. Juliusz Słowacki · −0.0820 − 0.0166i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  5. William Stevenson · −0.1115 − 0.0507i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
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