Poem fractal

The Birth of Pleasure

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

4 August 1792 to 8 July 1822 (~30)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not.”

Expressing Shelley's expansive conception of poetic imagination beyond ordinary limits. · 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. W. H. Davies · −0.3114 − 0.0750i · 0.002 away · Compare side by side
  2. Thomas Moore · −0.3111 − 0.0813i · 0.005 away · Compare side by side
  3. Emily Brontë · −0.3178 − 0.0697i · 0.008 away · Compare side by side
  4. A. Mary F. Robinson · −0.3041 − 0.0972i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  5. Richard Realf · −0.3158 − 0.0505i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
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