Poem fractal

Life and Death

by Christina Rossetti

5 December 1830 to 29 December 1894 (~64)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I do not blush to confess that it would afford me some gratification to place my productions before others, and ascertain how far what I do is expressive of mere individualism.”

A frank admission of the wish to test her poems against public judgement · Letter, quoted in Mackenzie Bell's biography

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. Mina Loy · −0.3132 + 0.1994i · 0.011 away · Compare side by side
  2. William Johnson Cory · −0.3222 + 0.1737i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  3. Ernest Dowson · −0.2745 + 0.2010i · 0.032 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edna St. Vincent Millay · −0.2794 + 0.1733i · 0.032 away · Compare side by side
  5. Edgar A. Guest · −0.3309 + 0.1681i · 0.036 away · Compare side by side
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