Poem fractal

Youth and the Pilgrim

by Sara Teasdale

8 August 1884 to 29 January 1933 (~49)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Every beat of his rhythm, the color of each word, the ring of each rhyme, must carry his poem, as a well-laid railway track carries a train of cars, smoothly to its destination.”

Comparing successful poetic technique to an unseen structure carrying the reader forward · Statement on poetic craft, in Marguerite Wilkinson, New Voices, 1919

More remarks (47)

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 · 0.4630 − 0.7790i · 0.002 away · Compare side by side
  2. Ella Wheeler Wilcox · 0.4550 − 0.7773i · 0.008 away · Compare side by side
  3. A.E.Housman · 0.4609 − 0.7606i · 0.020 away · Compare side by side
  4. Lizette Woodworth Reese · 0.4360 − 0.7946i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
  5. Sir Thomas Wyatt · 0.4346 − 0.7987i · 0.033 away · Compare side by side
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