Poem fractal

To Violets

by Robert Herrick

24 August 1591 to 15 October 1674 (~83)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Age is the worst enemy to beauty, and the most faithful friend to virtue.”

Contrasting physical decline with the possibility of moral maturity · Hesperides, prose material

More remarks (5)

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. James Joyce · 0.4780 − 1.4224i · 0.076 away · Compare side by side
  2. Ernest Hemingway · 0.4828 − 1.4362i · 0.088 away · Compare side by side
  3. James Joyce · 0.5331 − 1.4494i · 0.100 away · Compare side by side
  4. John Wesley Holloway · 0.3858 − 1.3521i · 0.122 away · Compare side by side
  5. Emily Dickinson · 0.5021 − 1.2151i · 0.137 away · Compare side by side
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