Poem fractal

The Mountain Tomb

by William Butler Yeats

13 June 1865 to 28 January 1939 (~74)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I believe that the arts lie dreaming of things to come.”

Presenting art as an imaginative anticipation of cultural and spiritual change · Essay, The Autumn of the Body, in Ideas of Good and Evil

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. Dylan Thomas · −0.2986 − 0.1265i · 0.010 away · Compare side by side
  2. Ella Wheeler Wilcox · −0.3096 − 0.1162i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  3. William Rose Benét · −0.2654 − 0.1102i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
  4. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · −0.3171 − 0.1122i · 0.032 away · Compare side by side
  5. A. Mary F. Robinson · −0.3041 − 0.0972i · 0.033 away · Compare side by side
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