Poem fractal
0.015 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.
−0.4173 − 0.5260i
Drawing the boundary…
−0.4280 − 0.5360i
Drawing the boundary…
Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.
Softly sailing emerald lights
Above the cornfields come and go,
Listlessly wandering to and fro:
The magic of these July nights
Has surely even pierced down deep
Where the earth's jewels unharmed sleep,
And filled with fire the emeralds there
And raised them thus to the outer air.
The gardener's cat's called Mignonette,
She hates the cold, she hates the wet,
She sits among the hothouse flowers
And sleeps for hours and hours and hours.
She dreams she is a tiger fierce
With great majestic claws that pierce.
She sits by the hot-water pipes
And dreams about a coat of stripes;
And in her slumbers she will go
And stalk the sullen buffalo,
And when he roars across the brake
She does not wink, she does not wake.
It must be perfectly immense
To dream with such magnificence.
And pass the most inclement day
In this indeed stupendous way.
She dreams of India's sunny clime,
And only wakes at dinner-time,
And even then she does not stir
But waits till milk is brought to her.
How nice to be the gardener's cat.
She troubles not for mouse or rat,
But, when it's coming down in streams,
She sits among the flowers and dreams.
The gardener's cat would be the thing,
Her dreams are so encouraging;
She dreams that she's a tiger, yet
She's just a cat called Mignonette!
The moral's this, my little man —
Sleep 'neath life's hailstones when you can,
And if you're humble in estate,
Dream splendidly, at any rate!
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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