Poem fractal

Acrostic on Miss Sally Clarke

by Thomas Chatterton

20 November 1752 to 24 August 1770 (~18)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“God had sent His creatures into the world with arms long enough to reach anything, if they would be at the trouble of extending them.”

An early recollection of his fierce belief in effort and self-reliance · Reported maxim, preserved in Croft's Love and Madness

More remarks (39)

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. Lord Byron · 0.1597 + 0.4639i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  2. Hartley Coleridge · 0.1199 + 0.4779i · 0.032 away · Compare side by side
  3. Richard · 0.1590 + 0.4446i · 0.034 away · Compare side by side
  4. D. H. Lawrence · 0.1698 + 0.4320i · 0.049 away · Compare side by side
  5. Thomas Bateson · 0.1628 + 0.5318i · 0.055 away · Compare side by side
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