Poem fractal

Catullian Hendecasyllables

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

21 October 1772 to 25 July 1834 (~62)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Nature is a wary wily long-breathed old Witch, tough-lived as a Turtle and divisible as the Polyp.”

A vivid personification of nature's resilience and cunning · Letter to James Gillman, 9 October 1825

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. Rudyard Kipling · 0.0167 + 0.9771i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  2. William Wordsworth · 0.0392 + 1.0015i · 0.044 away · Compare side by side
  3. Edward Coote Pinkney · −0.0234 + 0.9446i · 0.048 away · Compare side by side
  4. John Townsend Trowbridge · −0.0151 + 1.0360i · 0.050 away · Compare side by side
  5. Fiona Macleod · −0.0496 + 1.0441i · 0.073 away · Compare side by side
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