Poem fractal

The Chambered Nautilus

by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

29 August 1809 to 7 October 1894 (~85)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“For the first time since some early date, whether A. D. or A. Mundi I hardly know, I have got my harness off and am standing for a month or two in the stall.”

A comic metaphor for temporarily escaping literary labour · Letter to M. A. De Wolfe Howe Jr, September 22, 1887

More remarks (213)

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. Nora Hopper Chesson · −0.5449 + 0.1288i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge · −0.5136 + 0.1119i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
  3. Alfred Douglas · −0.5111 + 0.1035i · 0.033 away · Compare side by side
  4. Alfred Austin · −0.5422 + 0.0998i · 0.036 away · Compare side by side
  5. John Lyly · −0.5488 + 0.1617i · 0.037 away · Compare side by side
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