Poem fractal

The Helmsman

by Hilda Doolittle

10 September 1886 to 27 September 1961 (~75)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“The years were immaterial. He liked my light summer dresses. Ezra was not consciously a love-image. But he lurked there, hid there, under the years.”

Reflecting on how an early attachment can remain hidden beneath decades of later experience · Memoir, End to Torment

More remarks (42)

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. Richard · −0.7328 − 0.7458i · 0.017 away · Compare side by side
  2. Carl Sandburg · −0.7538 − 0.7296i · 0.020 away · Compare side by side
  3. Wilfred Campbell · −0.7648 − 0.7653i · 0.022 away · Compare side by side
  4. Ralph Waldo Emerson · −0.7194 − 0.7582i · 0.032 away · Compare side by side
  5. Emily Dickinson · −0.7915 − 0.7157i · 0.053 away · Compare side by side
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