Poem fractal

Love Lies Bleeding

by Christina Rossetti

5 December 1830 to 29 December 1894 (~64)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I should like to be a dozen years younger, and worthier every way of becoming your sister; but, such as I am, be sure of my loving welcome to you as my dear sister and friend.”

A warm and humble welcome to the woman who was to marry her brother · Letter to Lucy Brown, 10 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. Charles Tennyson Turner · 0.2815 + 0.6433i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  2. Walt Whitman · 0.2844 + 0.6260i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
  3. William Shakespeare · 0.2885 + 0.6377i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
  4. Ernest Dowson · 0.2667 + 0.6011i · 0.039 away · Compare side by side
  5. William Wordsworth · 0.2946 + 0.6783i · 0.054 away · Compare side by side
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