Poem fractal

A Lesson in Latin

by Lewis Carroll

27 January 1832 to 14 January 1898 (~66)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Celebrating imaginative openness and the suspension of ordinary limits · Through the Looking-Glass, dialogue

More remarks (4)

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. A. A. Milne · −0.0389 − 0.3756i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
  2. Age
    Walter Savage Landor · −0.0060 − 0.3728i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
  3. John Boyle O'Reilly · −0.0151 − 0.3810i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  4. Lew R. Sarett · −0.0453 − 0.3801i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
  5. Matthew Arnold · −0.0498 − 0.3850i · 0.038 away · Compare side by side
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