Poem fractal

Troopin'

by Rudyard Kipling

30 December 1865 to 18 January 1936 (~71)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“All you have to do for the next few years is to go out and get it. As, of course, you will.”

A brisk encouragement to make the most of opportunity through action. · Speech, Work in the Future, 1924

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. Nora Hopper Chesson · 0.7049 + 0.4665i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  2. Alphonse de Lamartine · 0.6102 + 0.5147i · 0.089 away · Compare side by side
  3. D. H. Lawrence · 0.6228 + 0.3918i · 0.113 away · Compare side by side
  4. Lady Anne Lindsay · 0.7001 + 0.3595i · 0.121 away · Compare side by side
  5. Charles Baudelaire · 0.6119 + 0.5722i · 0.122 away · Compare side by side
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