Poem fractal

The sovereign beauty which I do admire

by Edmund Spenser

c. 1552 to 13 January 1599 (~47)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The general end therefore of all the book is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”

Defining poetry as a means of moral and personal education · Letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, prefatory to The Faerie Queene

More remarks (4)

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. Christina Rossetti · −0.2521 + 0.6394i · 0.004 away · Compare side by side
  2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge · −0.2521 + 0.6214i · 0.014 away · Compare side by side
  3. William Wordsworth · −0.2663 + 0.6549i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
  4. Charlotte Smith · −0.2481 + 0.6601i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  5. Thomas Moore · −0.2708 + 0.6159i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
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