Poem fractal

You make the sunshine of my heart

by Mathilde Blind

21 March 1841 to 26 November 1896 (~55)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“It must be confessed that though, as a rule, we know very little of heaven, our experience of hell is pretty considerable.”

A darkly witty reflection on how familiar suffering is to human experience · Lecture, Shelley's View of Nature Contrasted with Darwin's (1886)

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. Ben Jonson · 0.5460 − 0.3294i · 0.029 away · Compare side by side
  2. Ella Wheeler Wilcox · 0.5327 − 0.3217i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
  3. James Joyce · 0.5222 − 0.3040i · 0.033 away · Compare side by side
  4. Christina Rossetti · 0.6066 − 0.3069i · 0.051 away · Compare side by side
  5. A. A. Milne · 0.4945 − 0.3015i · 0.061 away · Compare side by side
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