Poem fractal
0.023 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.
by John Ward
−0.3532 + 0.1743i
Drawing the boundary…
−0.3309 + 0.1681i
Drawing the boundary…
Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.
by John Ward
Come, sable night, put on thy mourning stole,
And help Amyntas sadly to condole.
Behold, the sun hath shut his golden eye,
The day is spent, and shades fair lights supply.
All things in sweet repose
Their labors close;
Only Amyntas wastes his hours in wailing,
Whilst all his hopes do faint, and life is failing.
If youth had been willing to listen
To all that its grandfathers told,
If the gray-bearded sage by the weight of his age
Had been able attention to hold,
We'd be reading by candles and heating with wood,
And where we were then we'd have certainly stood.
If youth had been willing to listen
To the warnings and hints of the wise,
Had it taken as true all the best which they knew,
And believed that no higher we'd rise,
The windows of sick rooms would still be kept shut
And we'd still use a cobweb to bandage a cut.
If youth had been willing to listen,
Had it clung to the best of the past,
With oxen right now we'd be struggling to plough
And thinking a horse travels fast.
We'd have stood where we were beyond question or doubt
If some pestilent germ hadn't wiped us all out.
So, although I am gray at the temples,
And settled and fixed in my ways,
I wouldn't hold youth to the limits of truth
That I learned in my brief yesterdays.
And I say to myself as they come and they go:
"Those kids may find something this age doesn't know."
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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