Poem fractal

Alas! Alas! I Can't Forget

by Amelia Alderson Opie

12 November 1769 to 2 December 1853 (~84)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“What a labour it is to laugh for a continuance! I am quite sore to-day with immoderate laughter yesterday!”

A characteristically playful account of laughter carried to excess · Letter to Mrs Taylor, 1801

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. Humbert Wolfe · 0.3569 − 0.7874i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
  2. Watcyn Wyn · 0.3540 − 0.7337i · 0.037 away · Compare side by side
  3. Watcyn Wyn · 0.3498 − 0.7299i · 0.039 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edna St. Vincent Millay · 0.3201 − 0.8015i · 0.039 away · Compare side by side
  5. Emily Dickinson · 0.3709 − 0.7927i · 0.044 away · Compare side by side
—
—
0:00
0:00
Track 1
Skip to main content