Poem fractal

A Spanish Girl in Reverie

by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

29 August 1809 to 7 October 1894 (~85)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I may doubt everything to-day if I will only do it civilly.”

Defending intellectual freedom while insisting that doubt need not become hostility · Religious reflections quoted in the memoir

More remarks (213)

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. Edna St. Vincent Millay · −0.3194 − 0.3986i · 0.011 away · Compare side by side
  2. Edgar A. Guest · −0.3172 − 0.3723i · 0.020 away · Compare side by side
  3. D. H. Lawrence · −0.3153 − 0.3719i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  4. Charles Kingsley · −0.3138 − 0.4134i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  5. George Henry Boker · −0.3521 − 0.3833i · 0.027 away · Compare side by side
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