You that seek what life is in death
You that seek what life is in death,
Now find it air that once was breath:
New names unknown, old names gone,
Till time end bodies, but souls none.
Reader! then make time, while you be,
But steps to your eternity.
Poem fractal
0.049 apart. A smaller distance means the lines are built more alike.
This number is read from the build of the lines. The bright edge is that number, carried outward until the pattern repeats.
0.5458 − 0.3694i
Drawing the boundary…
0.5327 − 0.3217i
Drawing the boundary…
Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.
You that seek what life is in death,
Now find it air that once was breath:
New names unknown, old names gone,
Till time end bodies, but souls none.
Reader! then make time, while you be,
But steps to your eternity.
You are here, and you are wanted,
Though a waif upon life's stair;
Though the sunlit hours are haunted
With the shadowy shapes of care.
Still the Great One, the All-Seeing
Called your spirit into being —
Gave you strength for any fate.
Since your life by Him was needed,
All your ways by Him are heeded —
You can trust and you can wait.
You can wait to know the meaning
Of the troubles sent your soul;
Of the chasms intervening
'Twixt your purpose and your goal;
Of the sorrows and the trials,
Of the silence and denials,
Ofttimes answering to your pleas;
Of the stinted sweets of pleasure,
And of pain's too generous measure
You can wait the WHY of these.
Forth from planet unto planet,
You have gone, and you will go.
Space is vast, but we must span it;
For life's purpose is TO KNOW.
Earth retains you but a minute,
Make the best of what lies in it;
Light the pathway where you are.
There is nothing worth the doing
That will leave regret or rueing,
As you speed from star to star.
You are part of the Beginning,
You are parcel of To-day.
When He set His world to spinning
You were flung upon your way.
When the system falls to pieces,
When this pulsing epoch ceases,
When the IS becomes the WAS,
You will live, for you will enter
In the great Creative Centre,
In the All-Enduring Cause.
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.
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.
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.
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