Thou art not always kind, O sleep: What awful secrets them dost keep In store, and ofttimes make us know; What hero has not fallen low In sleep before a monster grim, And whined for mercy unto him; Knights, constables, and men-at-arms Have quailed and whined in sleep's alarms. Thou wert not kind last night to make Me like a very coward shake— Shake like a thin red-currant bush Robbed of its fruit by a strong thrush. I felt this earth did move; more slow, And slower yet began to go; And not a bird was heard to sing, Men and great beasts were shivering; All living things knew well that when This earth stood still, destruction then Would follow with a mighty crash. 'Twas then I broke that awful hush: E'en as a mother, who does come Running in haste back to her home, And looks at once, and lo, the child She left asleep is gone; and wild She shrieks and loud—so did I break With a mad cry that dream, and wake.
Hence that fantastic wantonness of woe, O Youth to partial Fortune vainly dear! To plunder’d Want’s half-shelter’d hovel go, Go, and some hunger-bitten infant hear Moan haply in a dying mother’s ear: Or when the cold and dismal fog damps brood O’er the rank churchyard with sear elm leaves strew’d, Pace round some widow’s grave, whose dearer part Was slaughter’d, where o’er his uncoffin’d limbs The flocking flesh-birds scream’d! Then, while thy heart Groans, and thine eye a fiercer sorrow dims, Know (and the truth shall kindle thy young mind) What Nature makes thee mourn, she bids thee heal! O abject! if, to sickly dreams resign’d, All effortless thou leave Life’s commonweal A prey to Tyrants, Murderers of Mankind.
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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.