Poem fractal

To a Deaf and Dumb Little Girl

by Hartley Coleridge

19 September 1796 to 6 January 1849 (~53)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“But no, my mother, I never ceased to love you, tho’ times have been, when that love was more remorse and agony, proclaiming aloud the duties which it gave no strength to perform.”

Confessing the painful distance between enduring love and neglected duty · Letter to Mrs Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 10 October 1831

More remarks (49)

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. Thomas Chatterton · 0.1519 + 0.4777i · 0.032 away · Compare side by side
  2. Edna St. Vincent Millay · 0.0961 + 0.5084i · 0.039 away · Compare side by side
  3. Lord Byron · 0.1597 + 0.4639i · 0.042 away · Compare side by side
  4. John Donne · 0.0749 + 0.4599i · 0.048 away · Compare side by side
  5. Richard · 0.1590 + 0.4446i · 0.051 away · Compare side by side
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