Poem fractal

The Vampire

by Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton

8 November 1831 to 24 November 1891 (~60)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The heart has no wrinkles.”

Suggesting that feeling and emotional vitality can outlast outward age · Prose writing

More remarks (3)

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. Edna St. Vincent Millay · −0.1411 + 0.6906i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  2. Robert Stephen Hawker · −0.1563 + 0.7005i · 0.017 away · Compare side by side
  3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge · −0.1259 + 0.6808i · 0.029 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edna St. Vincent Millay · −0.1460 + 0.7361i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
  5. Edna St. Vincent Millay · −0.1478 + 0.6730i · 0.034 away · Compare side by side
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