Poem fractal

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

by William Butler Yeats

13 June 1865 to 28 January 1939 (~74)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Is not beauty, even as lasting love, one of the most difficult of the arts?”

Treating beauty and enduring love alike as achievements requiring sustained effort · Essay, The Looking-glass

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. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt · 0.0369 + 0.6104i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  2. William Wordsworth · 0.0694 + 0.6170i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
  3. Alan Seeger · 0.0733 + 0.6331i · 0.026 away · Compare side by side
  4. Lizette Woodworth Reese · 0.0255 + 0.6145i · 0.027 away · Compare side by side
  5. Richard · 0.0323 + 0.6601i · 0.035 away · Compare side by side
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