The Bishop tells us: "When the boys come back They will not be the same; for they'll have fought In a just cause: they lead the last attack On Anti-Christ; their comrade's blood has bought New right to breed an honourable race. They have challenged Death and dared him face to face."
"We're none of us the same!" the boys reply. "For George lost both his legs; and Bill's stone blind; Poor Jim's shot through the lungs and like to die; And Bert's gone syphilitic: you'll not find A chap who's served that hasn't found some change." And the Bishop said: "The ways of God are strange!"
Through the turbulent servility Of a churlish city street He strides opaquely; nothing in his walk Resembles an advancing gleam. His legs are muffled iron Stubbornly following even thoughts, His gaily pugnacious head Seems worried because no dread Remains for it to slay. His eyes hold an austerity That recalls itself while leaping, And often melts into amusement. The bent poise of his body Tells of walls that threw him back, Only to crumble underneath The stunned friendliness of his face. Through the angularly churlish street He walks, and stoops beneath the captured weight Of eyes that do not see him.
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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.