Poem fractal

The Mask

by William Butler Yeats

13 June 1865 to 28 January 1939 (~74)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“He must make his work a part of his own journey towards beauty and truth.”

Presenting artistic creation as a personal search for beauty and truth · Essay, Ireland and the Arts

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. Arthur Symons · 0.1777 − 0.7031i · 0.009 away · Compare side by side
  2. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · 0.1656 − 0.6817i · 0.020 away · Compare side by side
  3. Archibald MacLeish · 0.1503 − 0.7152i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  4. Christina Rossetti · 0.1951 − 0.7186i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
  5. A. Mary F. Robinson · 0.1377 − 0.7005i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
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