Poem fractal

Spring

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

28 July 1844 to 8 June 1889 (~45)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Poetry is in fact speech only employed to carry the meaning and emotion of the poet.”

Presenting poetry as heightened communication shaped by both sense and feeling · Letter to Robert Bridges

More remarks (4)

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. Edward Hovell-Thurlow · −0.5580 + 0.6062i · 0.012 away · Compare side by side
  2. Edna St. Vincent Millay · −0.5690 + 0.5928i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  3. Edna St. Vincent Millay · −0.5612 + 0.6197i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  4. John Keats · −0.5796 + 0.5943i · 0.032 away · Compare side by side
  5. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · −0.5762 + 0.6202i · 0.035 away · Compare side by side
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