Poem fractal

The Cloud

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

4 August 1792 to 8 July 1822 (~30)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism.”

Shelley's radical criticism of economic inequality and political instability. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

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. William Wordsworth · −0.3644 + 0.4665i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  2. Maxwell Bodenheim · −0.3625 + 0.4439i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  3. Emily Brontë · −0.3468 + 0.4278i · 0.029 away · Compare side by side
  4. Gerard Manley Hopkins · −0.3716 + 0.4442i · 0.029 away · Compare side by side
  5. William Lisle Bowles · −0.3333 + 0.4282i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
—
—
0:00
0:00
Track 1
Skip to main content