Poem fractal

Symbols

by Christina Rossetti

5 December 1830 to 29 December 1894 (~64)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“She had (for she is dead) a wonderfully Blakean gift, but therewithal a startling recklessness of poetic ways and means.”

A compact and perceptive early judgement on Emily Dickinson's poetic originality · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 6 December 1890

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. John Donne · −0.2965 − 0.3999i · 0.004 away · Compare side by side
  2. Charles Stuart Calverley · −0.3011 − 0.4026i · 0.008 away · Compare side by side
  3. Arthur O'Shaughnessy · −0.2813 − 0.4077i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edna St. Vincent Millay · −0.2883 − 0.3885i · 0.015 away · Compare side by side
  5. W.M. Herschell · −0.2840 − 0.4192i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
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