Poem fractal

Fayre eyes

by Edmund Spenser

c. 1552 to 13 January 1599 (~47)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The twelve books are twelve adventures or quests, which the twelve several knights undertake, in which they severally represent the twelve several virtues.”

Explaining the poem’s structure as an allegorical map of virtue · 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. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt · 0.5598 + 0.6134i · 0.054 away · Compare side by side
  2. Thomas MacDonagh · 0.4681 + 0.6430i · 0.068 away · Compare side by side
  3. Edmund Spenser · 0.6015 + 0.6883i · 0.074 away · Compare side by side
  4. Robert Browning · 0.4472 + 0.6083i · 0.101 away · Compare side by side
  5. Charles Baudelaire · 0.6119 + 0.5722i · 0.118 away · Compare side by side
—
—
0:00
0:00
Track 1
Skip to main content