Poem fractal

The True Knight

by Stephen Hawes

c. 1474 to c. 1523 (~49)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“For though the day be never so long, At last the bells ringeth to evensong.”

A reminder of mortality's inevitability, often detached as a standalone reflection on life's end · From The Pastime of Pleasure (widely attested as a proverbial close)

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. Alfred Douglas · −0.5111 + 0.1035i · 0.011 away · Compare side by side
  2. Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan · −0.5275 + 0.0891i · 0.011 away · Compare side by side
  3. Leigh Hunt · −0.5121 + 0.0812i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge · −0.5136 + 0.1119i · 0.017 away · Compare side by side
  5. Alfred Austin · −0.5422 + 0.0998i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
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