Thou that in fury with thy knotted tail Hast made this iron floor thy beaten drum; That now in silence walkst thy little space — Like a sea-captain — careless what may come:
What power has brought thy majesty to this, Who gave those eyes their dull and sleepy look; Who took their lightning out, and from thy throat The thunder when the whole wide forest shook?
It was that man who went again, alone, Into thy forest dark — Lord, he was brave! That man a fly has killed, whose bones are left Unburied till an earthquake digs his grave.
Doubt no more that Oberon— Never doubt that Pan Lived, and played a reed, and ran After nymphs in a dark forest In the merry, credulous days,— Lived, and led a fairy band Over the indulgent land! Ah, for in this dourest, sorest Age man’s eye has looked upon, Death to fauns and death to fays, Still the dog-wood dares to raise— Healthy tree, with trunk and root— Ivory bowls that bear no fruit, And the starlings and the jays— Birds that cannot even sing— Dare to come again in spring!
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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.