Poem fractal

Then Be It So, and Let Us Part

by Amelia Alderson Opie

12 November 1769 to 2 December 1853 (~84)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“How I wish I were, what I am not, and fear I never may be, weaned from the pleasures of this life, and given only to preparation for another!”

An unusually candid admission of the tension between earthly happiness and religious aspiration · Journal, 1832

More remarks (40)

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. Hart Crane · −0.1675 − 0.0343i · 0.008 away · Compare side by side
  2. J.M. Synge · −0.1748 − 0.0167i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  3. Violet Fane · −0.1853 − 0.0452i · 0.020 away · Compare side by side
  4. John Donne · −0.1472 − 0.0366i · 0.027 away · Compare side by side
  5. Elizabeth Stoddard · −0.1530 − 0.0099i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
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