Poem fractal
0.043 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.
−0.5398 − 0.8814i
Drawing the boundary…
by Mina Loy
−0.5605 − 0.9194i
Drawing the boundary…
Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.
Isled in the midnight air,
Musked with the dark's faint bloom,
Out into glooming and secret haunts
The flame cries, 'Come!'
Lovely in dye and fan,
A-tremble in shimmering grace,
A moth from her winter swoon
Uplifts her face:
Stares from her glamorous eyes;
Wafts her on plumes like mist;
In ecstasy swirls and sways
To her strange tryst.
by Mina Loy
The monstrous sapphire
lies in her lavish dowry
Crowned by Casinos
set with Provençal
olives
and spears to the mistral
The prevalent Fair
draws idle tides
over volcanic privacies
frilled with the rouse and hush of drowsing foam
Jewelled on her Adriatic arm
Venice, sarcophagus of sighs
and ghostly merchandise,
Splinters on the opal angle of the sun
and dies to the Angelus
an over purpled peach
swarmed by the flies of dusk
From the green incline
of vengence
the Vesuvian vine
drips lucently
Lacrimae Christi
to drift imperceptibly
with the lost sob of Shelley
Hewn in the Apuane
Carrara stands
as marble sentinel
beyond the blazing rust
of branches
roofing amphibian babies
as they rise
from the Ligurian gullies
Their polished thighs
armoured with aqueous ashes
of the tinselled sands.
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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