Poem fractal

Beggar to Beggar Cried

by William Butler Yeats

13 June 1865 to 28 January 1939 (~74)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“In literature, partly from the lack of that spoken word which knits us to normal man, we have lost in personality, in our delight in the whole man.”

Lamenting literature's separation from embodied personality and spoken human experience · Essay, Personality and the Intellectual Essences

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. Robert Burns · −0.4568 − 0.0758i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  2. Alfred Lord Tennyson · −0.4761 − 0.0435i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  3. Edith M. Thomas · −0.4803 − 0.0436i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
  4. A. A. Milne · −0.4739 − 0.0292i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
  5. Hart Crane · −0.4591 − 0.0262i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
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