Love in fantastic triumph sat, Whilst bleeding hearts around him flowed, For whom fresh pains he did create, And strange tyrannic power he showed. From thy bright eyes he took his fires, Which round about in sport he hurled; But 'twas from mine he took desires Enough t' undo the amorous world. From me he took his sighs and tears, From thee his pride and cruelty; From me his languishment and fears, And every killing dart from thee. Thus thou and I the god have armed, And set him up a deity; But my poor heart alone is harmed, Whilst thine the victor is, and free.
Beautiful Parsi woman in your pale silk veil With the gold border, why do you watch the sky? The sky is thick and cloudy with the bold strong wings Of the vulture, that shall tear your breast and thigh, On the tall Tower of Silence where you at length must lie.
Ah, but have not I, I too at the end of the northern May When the pasture slope was pink with the wild azalea And fragrant with its breath, Touched the brown treacherous earth with my living hand?— Thrown me prone on my own green coffin-lid, And smiled at the grass and had no thought of death?
You there with the tranquil lovely brow, What do you see so high,—some beautiful thing? The sun on the vulture’s wing?
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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.