Poem fractal

The Old Man's Funeral

by William Cullen Bryant

3 November 1794 to 12 June 1878 (~84)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Important, therefore, as may be the office of the imagination in poetry, the great spring of poetry is emotion.”

Placing emotion at the source of poetic creation · Lecture, On the Nature of Poetry, 1825–26

More remarks (20)

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. Robert Browning · −0.1999 + 0.2168i · 0.005 away · Compare side by side
  2. Edgar Allan Poe · −0.2006 + 0.2157i · 0.007 away · Compare side by side
  3. James Graham · −0.1919 + 0.2123i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  4. James Clarence Mangan · −0.1905 + 0.2106i · 0.015 away · Compare side by side
  5. William Blake · −0.1851 + 0.2125i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
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