Poem fractal

The Call

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

5 November 1850 to 30 October 1919 (~69)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“If you can find employment for them, and arouse their hope and self-confidence and ambition, it is better than carloads of clothing or furniture or provisions.”

Preferring empowerment and opportunity to merely giving material assistance · Essay, The Heart of the New Thought

More remarks (277)

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. Matthew Prior · 0.4136 − 0.7093i · 0.004 away · Compare side by side
  2. James Joyce · 0.4211 − 0.7206i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  3. James Clarence Mangan · 0.4317 − 0.6682i · 0.049 away · Compare side by side
  4. Richard · 0.3634 − 0.6980i · 0.050 away · Compare side by side
  5. T. S. Eliot · 0.3670 − 0.6817i · 0.054 away · Compare side by side
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