Poem fractal

On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year

by Lord Byron

22 January 1788 to 19 April 1824 (~36)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“What is Poetry?—The feeling of a Former world and Future.”

A compact definition linking poetry to memory and hope · Journal (Detached Thoughts, 1821)

More remarks (7)

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. Isobel Pagan · 0.0404 − 0.5651i · 0.012 away · Compare side by side
  2. Ralph Waldo Emerson · 0.0308 − 0.5428i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  3. John Keats · 0.0385 − 0.5710i · 0.017 away · Compare side by side
  4. A. Mary F. Robinson · 0.0550 − 0.5629i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  5. Edna St. Vincent Millay · 0.0486 − 0.5366i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
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