Poem fractal

The Key-Board

by William Watson

2 August 1858 to 11 August 1935 (~77)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“And after all, the highest beauty in art is, perhaps, a transcendent propriety.”

Valuing fitness and rightness above mere strangeness or excess in art · Essay, Excursions in Criticism

More remarks (3)

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. Joseph Campbell · −0.4983 − 0.8457i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  2. Thomas Hardy · −0.5008 − 0.8589i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  3. Thomas Hood · −0.5282 − 0.8230i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
  4. Stephen Phillips · −0.4911 − 0.8400i · 0.027 away · Compare side by side
  5. Walter de la Mare · −0.5398 − 0.8814i · 0.043 away · Compare side by side
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