Poem fractal

A Birthday

by Charles Tennyson Turner

4 July 1808 to 25 April 1879 (~71)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I often revert to my young days when your grandfather was my father’s friend.”

Connecting a younger friendship with memories of an earlier generation · Letter to Hardwicke Rawnsley, 1872

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. Edna St. Vincent Millay · −0.3670 + 0.5883i · 0.015 away · Compare side by side
  2. Algernon Charles Swinburne · −0.3446 + 0.5765i · 0.015 away · Compare side by side
  3. Dorothy Greenwell · −0.3565 + 0.6129i · 0.038 away · Compare side by side
  4. J. Milton Hayes · −0.3482 + 0.6132i · 0.040 away · Compare side by side
  5. Ralph Waldo Emerson · −0.3185 + 0.5742i · 0.041 away · Compare side by side
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