Poem fractal

Fallen Majesty

by William Butler Yeats

13 June 1865 to 28 January 1939 (~74)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“A wise theatre might make a training in strong and beautiful life the fashion, teaching before all else the heroic discipline of the looking-glass.”

Linking performance, self-awareness and disciplined cultivation of physical expression · Essay, The Looking-glass

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. D. H. Lawrence · −0.4559 + 0.5481i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  2. D. H. Lawrence · −0.4816 + 0.5230i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  3. Amy Lowell · −0.4795 + 0.5714i · 0.044 away · Compare side by side
  4. David Gray · −0.5051 + 0.5426i · 0.045 away · Compare side by side
  5. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · −0.4750 + 0.5749i · 0.046 away · Compare side by side
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