Poem fractal

Another Spring

by Christina Rossetti

5 December 1830 to 29 December 1894 (~64)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I send on your note to Theodore Watts unread, thinking it wiser on this occasion to peruse neither my own praises nor dispraises.”

An unusual determination to keep both praise and criticism at a distance · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 20 May 1892

More remarks (60)

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. Sara Teasdale · −0.3885 − 0.4302i · 0.011 away · Compare side by side
  2. Arthur O'Shaughnessy · −0.3767 − 0.4331i · 0.012 away · Compare side by side
  3. Amelia Alderson Opie · −0.3761 − 0.4393i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  4. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. · −0.3636 − 0.4177i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  5. Sir Henry Taylor · −0.3924 − 0.4385i · 0.020 away · Compare side by side
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