Poem fractal

Sunset

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

5 November 1850 to 30 October 1919 (~69)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“After thirty we must seize every hour and educate ourselves to grow into agreeable old age.”

Treating later life as a period requiring active preparation and learning · Essay, The Heart of the New Thought

More remarks (277)

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. Hart Crane · −0.9456 − 0.0183i · 0.071 away · Compare side by side
  2. Edward Thomas · −1.0657 + 0.0444i · 0.089 away · Compare side by side
  3. Hervey Allen · −0.8697 + 0.0801i · 0.113 away · Compare side by side
  4. Jessie R. Fauset · −1.0220 − 0.0836i · 0.137 away · Compare side by side
  5. Dylan Thomas · −0.9667 − 0.0971i · 0.143 away · Compare side by side
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