Poem fractal

Lift not the painted veil

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

4 August 1792 to 8 July 1822 (~30)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know.”

Arguing that imagination is needed not merely to invent but to perceive the significance of what is already known. · 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. Edmund Spenser · −0.5338 + 0.7381i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  2. William Wordsworth · −0.5376 + 0.7381i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  3. Carl Sandburg · −0.5170 + 0.7635i · 0.020 away · Compare side by side
  4. Emma Lazarus · −0.5301 + 0.7373i · 0.020 away · Compare side by side
  5. Hartley Coleridge · −0.5495 + 0.7340i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
—
—
0:00
0:00
Track 1
Skip to main content