Poem fractal

The Haunted House

by Felicia Dorothea Hemans

25 September 1793 to 16 May 1835 (~42)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“It is, in my opinion, full of beauty, and of truth, developing itself clearly and sorrowfully, like almost all truth, I believe, through the colouring mists of imagination.”

Linking artistic imagination with the gradual revelation of difficult truths · Letter fragment, familiar correspondence

More remarks (39)

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. Ralph Waldo Emerson · −0.2657 + 0.3815i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  2. Ralph Waldo Emerson · −0.2790 + 0.4167i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
  3. John Donne · −0.2666 + 0.4278i · 0.029 away · Compare side by side
  4. William Wordsworth · −0.2395 + 0.3791i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
  5. A. A. Milne · −0.2968 + 0.3878i · 0.036 away · Compare side by side
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