Poem fractal

Faith and Despondency

by Emily Brontë

30 July 1818 to 19 December 1848 (~30)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I long to be at home once again, and to see the house and the people that I love so much.”

A direct expression of homesickness and attachment to family · School letter exercise, My Dear Mama, 26 July 1842, translated from French

More remarks (11)

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. Percy Bysshe Shelley · −0.3133 − 0.0766i · 0.008 away · Compare side by side
  2. W. H. Davies · −0.3114 − 0.0750i · 0.008 away · Compare side by side
  3. Thomas Moore · −0.3111 − 0.0813i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  4. Ralph Waldo Emerson · −0.3194 − 0.0510i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  5. Richard Realf · −0.3158 − 0.0505i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
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