Poem fractal

Gentlemen-Rankers

by Rudyard Kipling

30 December 1865 to 18 January 1936 (~71)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“There is a certain darkness into which the soul of the young man sometimes descends—a horror of desolation, abandonment, and realised worthlessness.”

Acknowledging the profound loneliness and despair that can accompany youth. · Speech, Values in Life, 1907

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. Samuel Taylor Coleridge · −0.0027 + 0.9879i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  2. William Wordsworth · 0.0392 + 1.0015i · 0.033 away · Compare side by side
  3. Edward Coote Pinkney · −0.0234 + 0.9446i · 0.052 away · Compare side by side
  4. John Townsend Trowbridge · −0.0151 + 1.0360i · 0.067 away · Compare side by side
  5. John Boyle O'Reilly · −0.0169 + 0.9123i · 0.073 away · Compare side by side
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