Poem fractal

I Have Wandered to a Spring

by Edna Wahlert McCourt

19 July 1887 to 4 January 1963 (~76)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“And yet, although there were apparently hordes of us Americans who were eager and able to talk French with him, he could not be persuaded to speak of himself personally, or of his intimate experiences.”

A study of the distance between public curiosity and private suffering · Short story, The Captain and the Miracle (1918)

More remarks (39)

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 Butler Yeats · 0.0845 − 0.2386i · 0.006 away · Compare side by side
  2. Nora Hopper Chesson · 0.0985 − 0.2284i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  3. E. Nesbit · 0.0959 − 0.2184i · 0.017 away · Compare side by side
  4. John Donne · 0.0761 − 0.2182i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  5. William Blake · 0.0702 − 0.2626i · 0.034 away · Compare side by side
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