Poem fractal

The Muted Quill

by Richard

Poems The salon

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. Hilda Doolittle · −0.7496 − 0.7488i · 0.017 away · Compare side by side
  2. Ralph Waldo Emerson · −0.7194 − 0.7582i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  3. Carl Sandburg · −0.7538 − 0.7296i · 0.027 away · Compare side by side
  4. Wilfred Campbell · −0.7648 − 0.7653i · 0.037 away · Compare side by side
  5. Emily Dickinson · −0.7467 − 0.6819i · 0.065 away · Compare side by side
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