I am worn out with the effort of trying to love people and not succeeding.
Now I've made up my mind I love nobody, I'm going to love nobody, I'm not going to tell any lies about it and it's final.
If there's a man here and there, or a woman whom I can really like, that's quite enough for me.
And if by a miracle a woman happened to come along who warmed the cockles of my heart I'd rejoice over the woman and the warmed cockles of my heart so long as it didn't all fizzle out in talk.
Her arms across her breast she laid; She was more fair than words can say: Bare-footed came the beggar maid Before the king Cophetua. In robe and crown the king stept down, To meet and greet her on her way; 'It is no wonder,' said the lords, 'She is more beautiful than day.'
As shines the moon in clouded skies, She in her poor attire was seen: One praised her ancles, one her eyes, One her dark hair and lovesome mien. So sweet a face, such angel grace, In all that land had never been: Cophetua sware a royal oath: 'This beggar maid shall be my queen!'
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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.