Poem fractal

To Nature

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

21 October 1772 to 25 July 1834 (~62)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Poetry is the best words in the best order.”

Defining poetic craft through precision and arrangement · Notes and marginalia

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. Edmund Spenser · −0.2525 + 0.6350i · 0.014 away · Compare side by side
  2. Christina Rossetti · −0.2521 + 0.6394i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  3. Thomas Moore · −0.2708 + 0.6159i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edna St. Vincent Millay · −0.2721 + 0.6139i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  5. James Edwin Campbell · −0.2269 + 0.5963i · 0.036 away · Compare side by side
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