Poem fractal

Tears, Idle Tears

by Alfred Lord Tennyson

6 August 1809 to 6 October 1892 (~83)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“This is a terrible age of unfaith. I hate utter unfaith, I cannot endure that men should sacrifice everything at the cold altar of what with their imperfect knowledge they choose to call truth and reason.”

Rejecting a narrow rationalism that dismisses spiritual experience · Recorded remarks on faith in the Memoir

More remarks (44)

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. Richard · −0.2631 + 0.0232i · 0.011 away · Compare side by side
  2. Thomas Moore · −0.2622 + 0.0031i · 0.014 away · Compare side by side
  3. Ralph Waldo Emerson · −0.2429 + 0.0257i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  4. Claude McKay · −0.2375 + 0.0037i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  5. Edgar Allan Poe · −0.2815 + 0.0017i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
—
—
0:00
0:00
Track 1
Skip to main content