Poem fractal

The Second Coming

by William Butler Yeats

13 June 1865 to 28 January 1939 (~74)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“No mind is more valuable than the images it contains.”

Affirming the central importance of a mind's store of emotionally resonant images · Essay, The Two Kinds of Asceticism

More remarks (81)

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. Samuel Taylor Coleridge · −0.3186 + 0.3866i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  2. A. A. Milne · −0.2968 + 0.3878i · 0.017 away · Compare side by side
  3. David Melvill · −0.3245 + 0.4212i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  4. Ralph Waldo Emerson · −0.2790 + 0.4167i · 0.035 away · Compare side by side
  5. William Lisle Bowles · −0.3333 + 0.4282i · 0.037 away · Compare side by side
—
—
0:00
0:00
Track 1
Skip to main content