Poem fractal

An Old Song Resung

by William Butler Yeats

13 June 1865 to 28 January 1939 (~74)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“A wise theatre might make a training in strong and beautiful life the fashion, teaching before all else the heroic discipline of the looking-glass.”

Linking performance, self-awareness and disciplined cultivation of physical expression · Essay, The Looking-glass

More remarks (81)

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. Elizabeth Barrett Browning · 0.3239 + 0.7284i · 0.045 away · Compare side by side
  2. Edna St. Vincent Millay · 0.3643 + 0.6683i · 0.052 away · Compare side by side
  3. William Dunbar · 0.2945 + 0.6921i · 0.079 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edna St. Vincent Millay · 0.2896 + 0.7394i · 0.081 away · Compare side by side
  5. William Wordsworth · 0.2946 + 0.6783i · 0.085 away · Compare side by side
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