Poem fractal

Seaward, white gleaming thro’ the busy scud

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

21 October 1772 to 25 July 1834 (~62)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“From my early reading of Faery Tales, and Genii and so on, my mind had been habituated to the Vast, and I never regarded my senses in any way as the criteria of my belief.”

Recalling how early wonder literature shaped a mind open to the grand and the unseen · Letter to Thomas Poole, 16 October 1797

More remarks (70)

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. Alfred Austin · −0.5924 + 0.0891i · 0.007 away · Compare side by side
  2. Dylan Thomas · −0.5912 + 0.0979i · 0.011 away · Compare side by side
  3. John Van Alstyne Weaver · −0.5927 + 0.0728i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  4. Dylan Thomas · −0.5967 + 0.0614i · 0.029 away · Compare side by side
  5. A. A. Milne · −0.6114 + 0.0592i · 0.033 away · Compare side by side
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