Poem fractal

Falling Leaves

by Fannie Isabel Sherrick

c. 31 May 1855 to c. 1890 (~35)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“To whose encouragement much of my success in literature is due”

A public acknowledgement that friendship and encouragement helped her writing life · Dedication of Star-Dust, 1888, to Ella Wheeler Wilcox

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. Ralph Waldo Emerson · 0.2052 − 0.7100i · 0.017 away · Compare side by side
  2. Mina Loy · 0.2130 − 0.7296i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  3. A. A. Milne · 0.2183 − 0.7350i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  4. Charles Webbe · 0.2196 − 0.6928i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  5. Thomas Randolph · 0.2259 − 0.7355i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
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