Poem fractal

Passing and Glassing

by Christina Rossetti

5 December 1830 to 29 December 1894 (~64)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“In my desperation I knit lace with a perseverance completely foreign to my nature.”

A dryly comic picture of enforced industry · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, August 1849

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. Thomas Hood · −0.5125 − 0.4633i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  2. Walter de la Mare · −0.5084 − 0.4532i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  3. Felicia Dorothea Hemans · −0.5101 − 0.4452i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  4. William Blake · −0.4992 − 0.4570i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
  5. Joanna Baillie · −0.5224 − 0.4946i · 0.033 away · Compare side by side
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