Poem fractal

I Will Arise

by Christina Rossetti

5 December 1830 to 29 December 1894 (~64)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I seriously urge on your consideration the increase of prose and decrease of poetry in the Germ; the present state of things strikes me as most alarming.”

Playful mock-alarm at her own youthful outpouring of verse · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 31 January 1850

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. Arthur Symons · −0.0230 + 0.0131i · 0.012 away · Compare side by side
  2. Hart Crane · 0.0027 + 0.0286i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  3. Leonard Bacon · −0.0312 + 0.0137i · 0.020 away · Compare side by side
  4. George Marion McClellan · 0.0173 + 0.0188i · 0.029 away · Compare side by side
  5. John Donne · 0.0018 − 0.0079i · 0.029 away · Compare side by side
—
—
0:00
0:00
Track 1
Skip to main content