The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall, The fly her spleen, the little spark his heat; The slender hairs cast shadows, though but small, And bees have stings, although they be not great; Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs: And love is love, in beggars and in kings.
Where waters smoothest run, there deepest are the fords; The dial stirs, yet none perceives it move; The firmest faith is found in fewest words; The turtles do not sing, and yet they love; True hearts have ears and eyes, no tongues to speak: They hear and see, and sigh, and then they break.
And what about a Cowboy, Policeman, Jailer, Engine-driver, Or Pirate Chief? What about a Postman — or a Keeper at the Zoo? What about the Circus Man who lets the people through? And the man who takes the pennies for the roundabouts and swings, Or the man who plays the organ, and the other man who sings? What about a Conjuror with rabbits in his pockets? What about a Rocket Man who's always making rockets? Oh, there's such a lot of things to do and such a lot to be That there's always lots of cherries on my little cherry tree!
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Track 1
How this picture is made
What a fractal is
A fractal is a shape that keeps its pattern when you look closer. Coastlines, trees, shells, and weather do this. The large form and the small form are the same kind of thing. A poem can be drawn that way. The shape of the whole comes from the shape of the lines.
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.
How the boundary is drawn
The number under the picture is the poem constant. It is read from the build of the lines: their length, how uneven they are, the size of the stanzas, the share of vowels, and the way the lines end. A new word moves the number when it changes that build. The same poem always gives the same number.
Drawn on its own, that number sits in a quiet part of the plane, and most poems would look like the same soft disk. So the number is carried outward along its own direction until it meets the edge of the Mandelbrot set, where the shape turns sharp. The picture is the Julia set of that meeting place.
Each point on the canvas is folded again and again by one small rule. Points that stay near the rule form the dark interior. Points that rush away become the coloured bands. The hue comes from the poem constant, and the brightest bands turn toward gold. Change the length of a line, the stanza, or the vowel share, and both the number and the picture move.
What the branching signifies
Branching draws the poem as a tree. Each turn follows a line, and every smaller branch repeats that pattern. A longer line reaches farther. The letters at the start of a line bend the next turn. A higher share of vowels opens the branches wider.
The trunk takes its colour from the poem constant and warms toward gold at the tips. When the poem has more than one stanza, gold forks leave the trunk. Each fork is a stanza beyond the first, up to three. The tree divides where the poem divides. One stanza remains a single trunk.