Poem fractal

September 1913

by William Butler Yeats

13 June 1865 to 28 January 1939 (~74)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“If that is true, the saint goes to the centre, the poet and artist to the ring where everything comes round again.”

Contrasting the saint's search for stillness with the artist's fascination with recurring life · Essay, In the Serpent’s Mouth

More remarks (81)

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 Wahlert McCourt · 0.0861 − 0.2328i · 0.006 away · Compare side by side
  2. Nora Hopper Chesson · 0.0985 − 0.2284i · 0.017 away · Compare side by side
  3. John Donne · 0.0761 − 0.2182i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  4. E. Nesbit · 0.0959 − 0.2184i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  5. William Blake · 0.0702 − 0.2626i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
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