Poem fractal

Crazy Sally!

by Amelia Alderson Opie

12 November 1769 to 2 December 1853 (~84)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The heart that has once truly loved, never forgets.”

Expressing the enduring power of love and memory · Commonly attributed to Amelia Opie

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. Siegfried Sassoon · 0.1379 + 0.2464i · 0.012 away · Compare side by side
  2. D. H. Lawrence · 0.1101 + 0.2458i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  3. Philip Bourke Marston · 0.1099 + 0.2629i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  4. Kahlil Gibran · 0.1129 + 0.2249i · 0.029 away · Compare side by side
  5. Philip Bourke Marston · 0.0985 + 0.2594i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
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