Poem fractal

Contradictions

by Mary Coleridge

23 September 1861 to 25 August 1907 (~46)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“It is like a little ray of candle-light by which darkness becomes visible. But the joy of love is sunshine.”

Contrasting the faint light of intellect with the fullness of love · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1886

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. Thomas Heywood · 0.1511 + 0.0498i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  2. John Donne · 0.1447 + 0.0375i · 0.014 away · Compare side by side
  3. Algernon Charles Swinburne · 0.1288 + 0.0295i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  4. Arthur Symons · 0.1409 + 0.0797i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
  5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge · 0.1225 + 0.0820i · 0.036 away · Compare side by side
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