Poem fractal

One Foot on Sea, and One on Shore

by Christina Rossetti

5 December 1830 to 29 December 1894 (~64)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I am surprised to see the suggestion that (perhaps as a devout self-denial) I forbore to make my verse as good as I could: neither as praise nor as blame do I deserve the imputation.”

Rossetti firmly rejects the idea that religious humility made her deliberately weaken her poetry · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 9 November 1892

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. Witter Bynner · −0.0729 − 0.6254i · 0.008 away · Compare side by side
  2. Joseph Seamon Cotter Sr. · −0.0687 − 0.6249i · 0.010 away · Compare side by side
  3. Arthur O'Shaughnessy · −0.0684 − 0.6248i · 0.010 away · Compare side by side
  4. Richard · −0.0784 − 0.6284i · 0.012 away · Compare side by side
  5. Gerard Manley Hopkins · −0.0750 − 0.6329i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
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