Poem fractal

My Comforter

by Emily Brontë

30 July 1818 to 19 December 1848 (~30)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Nature is an inexplicable problem; it exists on a principle of destruction.”

Confronting the disturbing dependence of life upon suffering and death · Essay, The Butterfly (1842)

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. A. Mary F. Robinson · −0.0825 − 0.5680i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  2. G. K. Chesterton · −0.0620 − 0.5935i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  3. Sara Teasdale · −0.0962 − 0.6069i · 0.027 away · Compare side by side
  4. George Henry Boker · −0.0961 − 0.5569i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
  5. John Donne · −0.0482 − 0.5832i · 0.034 away · Compare side by side
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