Poem fractal

When?

by Susan Coolidge

29 January 1835 to 9 April 1905 (~70)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Everything in the world has two handles. One is a smooth handle. If you take hold of it, the thing comes up lightly and easily, but if you seize the rough handle, it hurts your hand and the thing is hard to lift.”

Practical advice on choosing the easier, kinder approach to difficulties · From What Katy Did (narrated wisdom commonly attributed as the author's counsel)

More remarks (1)

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. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · −0.3239 − 0.2137i · 0.012 away · Compare side by side
  2. Alexander Anderson · −0.3188 − 0.1911i · 0.014 away · Compare side by side
  3. A. A. Milne · −0.3042 − 0.1913i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  4. Dylan Thomas · −0.3321 − 0.2165i · 0.020 away · Compare side by side
  5. Ralph Waldo Emerson · −0.3537 − 0.1986i · 0.038 away · Compare side by side
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