Poem fractal

After Death

by Christina Rossetti

5 December 1830 to 29 December 1894 (~64)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“It is balm to my Mother and to me to hear a man of genius who is also a Christian, who speaks of the personages and facts of the Bible as of personages and facts.”

Rossetti welcomes artistic talent joined explicitly to religious conviction · Letter to Frederic J. Shields, 1878

More remarks (60)

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. Edmund Spenser · −0.2525 + 0.6350i · 0.004 away · Compare side by side
  2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge · −0.2521 + 0.6214i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  3. William Wordsworth · −0.2663 + 0.6549i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  4. Charlotte Smith · −0.2481 + 0.6601i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  5. Thomas Moore · −0.2708 + 0.6159i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
—
—
0:00
0:00
Track 1
Skip to main content