Poem fractal

The Wild Ride

by Louise Imogen Guiney

7 January 1861 to 2 November 1920 (~59)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Life is a breathing-space between two eternities, a holiday with appalling realities behind and before.”

A concise view of human existence as brief and bounded by the unknown · Essay, Goose-Quill Papers, 1885

More remarks (4)

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. Nora Hopper Chesson · −0.0820 + 0.8727i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  2. William Sidney Walker · −0.0794 + 0.8900i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  3. Thomas Chatterton · −0.0762 + 0.8425i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
  4. Thomas Hood · −0.0432 + 0.9047i · 0.043 away · Compare side by side
  5. William Cullen Bryant · −0.0304 + 0.8274i · 0.055 away · Compare side by side
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