Poem fractal

First Advent of Love

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

21 October 1772 to 25 July 1834 (~62)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I am dying, but without expectation of a speedy release. Is it not strange that very recently by-gone images, and scenes of early life, have stolen into my mind, like breezes blown from the spice-islands of Youth and Hope?”

A poignant reflection on memory and mortality near the end of life · Table Talk, 10 July 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. John Donne · −0.4442 + 0.2861i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  2. Philip Bourke Marston · −0.4783 + 0.3170i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
  3. Alice Dunbar Nelson · −0.4276 + 0.2970i · 0.032 away · Compare side by side
  4. John Milton · −0.4938 + 0.2744i · 0.041 away · Compare side by side
  5. Gordon Bottomley · −0.4945 + 0.2693i · 0.044 away · Compare side by side
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