Poem fractal

Ozymandias

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

4 August 1792 to 8 July 1822 (~30)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, is a principal source of moral improvement.”

Linking intellectual discovery with humanity's moral development. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

More remarks (44)

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. Hart Crane · −0.7557 + 0.7791i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  2. Charles Bertram Johnson · −0.6981 + 0.8052i · 0.053 away · Compare side by side
  3. Charlotte Smith · −0.6914 + 0.7503i · 0.058 away · Compare side by side
  4. Thomas Hood · −0.6985 + 0.7338i · 0.062 away · Compare side by side
  5. Oscar Wilde · −0.6758 + 0.7931i · 0.069 away · Compare side by side
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