Poem fractal

A Daydream

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

21 October 1772 to 25 July 1834 (~62)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age.”

Expressing late-life affection for Chaucer's cheerful spirit · Table Talk, 15 March 1834

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. Arthur Symons · 0.1409 + 0.0797i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  2. Robert Frost · 0.0990 + 0.0683i · 0.027 away · Compare side by side
  3. Mary Coleridge · 0.1379 + 0.0495i · 0.036 away · Compare side by side
  4. D. H. Lawrence · 0.0824 + 0.0886i · 0.041 away · Compare side by side
  5. Thomas Heywood · 0.1511 + 0.0498i · 0.043 away · Compare side by side
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