Poem fractal

Go, Youth Beloved, in Distant Glades

by Amelia Alderson Opie

12 November 1769 to 2 December 1853 (~84)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“It so overpowered me, that I could not read it through at first, and wept because the eye it would most have pleased, would not see it.”

Literary praise becomes poignant because a beloved witness was no longer alive · Remark on Southey's Colloquies, 1829

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. Francis Ledwidge · −0.2276 − 0.2146i · 0.011 away · Compare side by side
  2. Nora Hopper Chesson · −0.2476 − 0.2280i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  3. Thomas Traherne · −0.2150 − 0.2059i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  4. Sara Teasdale · −0.2407 − 0.1855i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
  5. George Eliot · −0.2300 − 0.1832i · 0.027 away · Compare side by side
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