Poem fractal

What is Life?

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

21 October 1772 to 25 July 1834 (~62)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Party men always hate a slightly differing friend more than a downright enemy.”

Noting the peculiar bitterness of near-difference in politics · Table Talk, 7 June 1830

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. Philip Bourke Marston · −0.2209 + 0.1744i · 0.010 away · Compare side by side
  2. Edgar Lee Masters · −0.2200 + 0.1728i · 0.011 away · Compare side by side
  3. John Donne · −0.2324 + 0.1908i · 0.017 away · Compare side by side
  4. Ford Madox Hueffer · −0.2416 + 0.1585i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  5. D. H. Lawrence · −0.2331 + 0.1925i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
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