Poem fractal

The Handsome Heart

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

28 July 1844 to 8 June 1889 (~45)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened.”

Arguing that poetry should intensify living speech rather than retreat into an artificial idiom · Letter to Robert Bridges

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. Mathilde Blind · −0.1587 + 0.2318i · 0.017 away · Compare side by side
  2. William Walsh · −0.1782 + 0.2154i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  3. Algernon Charles Swinburne · −0.1458 + 0.1992i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  4. Nora Hopper Chesson · −0.1598 + 0.2359i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  5. William Blake · −0.1851 + 0.2125i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
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