Poem fractal

Consider the Lilies of the Field

by Christina Rossetti

5 December 1830 to 29 December 1894 (~64)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I like touches about animals, and sympathy with their poor little cares and fortunes.”

A revealing expression of her tenderness towards animals and small lives · Letter to Oliver Madox Brown, July 1873

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. Carl Sandburg · 0.0004 − 0.1871i · 0.008 away · Compare side by side
  2. Lewis Carroll · 0.0068 − 0.1820i · 0.010 away · Compare side by side
  3. Edna St. Vincent Millay · 0.0002 − 0.2003i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  4. Francis Pilkington · 0.0055 − 0.2015i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  5. Mary Coleridge · 0.0230 − 0.1643i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
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