Poem fractal

Wooing

by Robert Bridges

23 October 1844 to 21 April 1930 (~86)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“No one ever wrote words with more critical deliberation than Gerard Hopkins.”

Paying tribute to Hopkins's extraordinary care with language · Memoir of Digby Mackworth Dolben

More remarks (44)

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. Emily Dickinson · −0.1194 − 1.0067i · 0.015 away · Compare side by side
  2. Emily Dickinson · −0.1183 − 1.0206i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  3. Emily Dickinson · −0.0979 − 1.0308i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  4. Nora Hopper Chesson · −0.0908 − 0.9901i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  5. Emily Dickinson · −0.1073 − 0.9819i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
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