Poem fractal

Gunga Din

by Rudyard Kipling

30 December 1865 to 18 January 1936 (~71)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Your path has been smoothed for just that end. When Mr. Rhodes was brooding over his scheme of the scholarships, he used to say the game is to get them to knock up against each other.”

Emphasising the importance of opportunity and contact between people. · Speech, Work in the Future, 1924

More remarks (152)

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. James Joyce · 0.1925 + 0.5255i · 0.010 away · Compare side by side
  2. William Wordsworth · 0.1987 + 0.5300i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  3. Thomas Bateson · 0.1628 + 0.5318i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edna St. Vincent Millay · 0.2088 + 0.5215i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  5. Arthur Hugh Clough · 0.1964 + 0.5706i · 0.040 away · Compare side by side
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