Poem fractal

A sunny shaft did I behold

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

21 October 1772 to 25 July 1834 (~62)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“People of humour are always in some degree people of genius.”

Associating comic perception with creative intelligence · Notes and lectures

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. Aphra Behn · 0.0538 − 0.6240i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  2. Robert Burns · 0.0447 − 0.5979i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
  3. Anna Lætitia Barbauld · 0.0746 − 0.6488i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
  4. Emily Dickinson · 0.0856 − 0.6450i · 0.032 away · Compare side by side
  5. Sara Teasdale · 0.0319 − 0.6245i · 0.035 away · Compare side by side
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