What thing is love? for sure love is a thing. It is a prick, it is a sting, It is a pretty, pretty thing; It is a fire, it is a coal, Whose flame creeps in at every hole; And as my wit doth best devise, Love's dwelling is in ladies' eyes,
From whence do glance love's piercing darts, That make such holes into our hearts; And all the world herein accord, Love is a great and mighty lord; And when he list to mount so high, With Venus he in heaven doth lie, And evermore hath been a god, Since Mars and she played even and odd.
Oh! snatched away in beauty's bloom, On thee shall press no ponderous tomb; But on thy turf shall roses rear Their leaves, the earliest of the year; And the wild cypress wave in tender gloom:
And oft by yon blue gushing stream Shall Sorrow lean her drooping head, And feed deep thought with many a dream, And lingering pause and lightly tread; Fond wretch! as if her step disturbed the dead!
Away! we know that tears are vain, That Death nor heeds nor hears distress: Will this unteach us to complain? Or make one mourner weep the less? And thou—who tell'st me to forget, Thy looks are wan, thine eyes are wet.
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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.