It was the Rainbow gave thee birth, And left thee all her lovely hues; And, as her mother’s name was Tears, So runs it in my blood to choose For haunts the lonely pools, and keep In company with trees that weep. Go you and, with such glorious hues, Live with proud peacocks in green parks; On lawns as smooth as shining glass, Let every feather show its marks; Get thee on boughs and clap thy wings Before the windows of proud kings. Nay, lovely Bird, thou art not vain; Thou hast no proud, ambitious mind; I also love a quiet place That’s green, away from all mankind; A lonely pool, and let a tree Sigh with her bosom over me.
I have been in love, and in debt, and in drink This many and many a year; And those three are plagues enough one would think For one poor mortal to bear. 'Twas drink made me fall into Love, And Love made me run into debt, And though I have strugled and strugled and strove, I cannot get out of them yet. There's nothing but money can cure me, And rid me of all my pain. 'Twil pay all my debts, And remove all my lets, And my Mistris that cannot endure me, Will love me, and love me again, Then I'll fall to loving and drinking amain.
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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.