Poem fractal

The Loves

by Walter Savage Landor

30 January 1775 to 17 September 1864 (~89)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The assailant is often in the right.”

The attacker may be justified · Conversation / essay (as commonly attributed)

More remarks (112)

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. Richard · −0.1283 + 0.2910i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  2. John Keats · −0.0959 + 0.2995i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  3. Ralph Waldo Emerson · −0.0954 + 0.3016i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  4. Siegfried Sassoon · −0.1376 + 0.3087i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  5. Patrick Reginald Chalmers · −0.0914 + 0.2932i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
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