Poem fractal

A Young Man's Song

by William Butler Yeats

13 June 1865 to 28 January 1939 (~74)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The artist stands between the saint and the world of impermanent things.”

Placing the artist between spiritual permanence and the transient world of experience · Essay, The Two Kinds of Asceticism

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. Vachel Lindsay · 0.2833 − 0.4356i · 0.010 away · Compare side by side
  2. Robert Burns · 0.2918 − 0.4444i · 0.012 away · Compare side by side
  3. Robert Frost · 0.2632 − 0.4616i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
  4. Helen Hunt Jackson · 0.2697 − 0.4207i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  5. Nora Hopper Chesson · 0.2819 − 0.4099i · 0.035 away · Compare side by side
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