Poem fractal

The Widow at Windsor

by Rudyard Kipling

30 December 1865 to 18 January 1936 (~71)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“A man may be constitutionally lazy; or he may be overstrained, and so take refuge in a book to rest himself.”

Acknowledging that people read for many reasons beyond self-improvement. · Speech, The Uses of Reading, 1912

More remarks (152)

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. Amy Lowell · −0.0991 + 0.6096i · 0.017 away · Compare side by side
  2. Charlotte Smith · −0.1083 + 0.5734i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  3. Ella Wheeler Wilcox · −0.1270 + 0.5944i · 0.029 away · Compare side by side
  4. William Wordsworth · −0.1114 + 0.5648i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
  5. William Wordsworth · −0.0575 + 0.5889i · 0.041 away · Compare side by side
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