Poem fractal

A Wintry Sonnet

by Christina Rossetti

5 December 1830 to 29 December 1894 (~64)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I am feeling at 60 very much as I did at 59, though not quite as relieved and exhilarated by the circumstance as when at 30 I gazed in the looking-glass, and discerned no marked change from 29.”

Ageing is treated with humour, perspective and a refusal of melodrama · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 6 December 1890

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. Hartley Coleridge · −0.2050 + 0.7503i · 0.007 away · Compare side by side
  2. William Wordsworth · −0.2052 + 0.7667i · 0.020 away · Compare side by side
  3. Gerard Manley Hopkins · −0.2349 + 0.7551i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
  4. Alfred Lord Tennyson · −0.2071 + 0.7724i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  5. Charles Tennyson Turner · −0.1909 + 0.7695i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
—
—
0:00
0:00
Track 1
Skip to main content