Poem fractal

All Things Can Tempt Me

by William Butler Yeats

13 June 1865 to 28 January 1939 (~74)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I entered into myself and pictured myself and not some essence when I was not seeking beauty at all, but merely to lighten the mind of some burden of love or bitterness.”

Describing authentic art as emerging from the need to release emotional burdens · Essay, The Tree of Life

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. Lucian B. Watkins · −0.1986 + 0.3238i · 0.005 away · Compare side by side
  2. John Keats · −0.1852 + 0.3122i · 0.015 away · Compare side by side
  3. William Wordsworth · −0.1926 + 0.3020i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  4. John Drinkwater · −0.1743 + 0.3067i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  5. Sir Walter Raleigh · −0.1896 + 0.2954i · 0.029 away · Compare side by side
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