Poem fractal

Winding all my life about thee

by Mathilde Blind

21 March 1841 to 26 November 1896 (~55)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Indeed, most of our knowledge comes to us second-hand, through the medium of men with their cut-and-dried theories as to what women are or ought to be.”

Challenging inherited theories about women shaped largely by male observers · Introduction to The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff (1890)

More remarks (39)

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. James Joyce · 0.1279 − 0.8285i · 0.013 away · Compare side by side
  2. William Browne, of Tavistock · 0.1233 − 0.8168i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  3. Lewis Carroll · 0.1201 − 0.8170i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  4. Emily Dickinson · 0.1653 − 0.8366i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  5. Emily Dickinson · 0.1109 − 0.8284i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
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