A Dream
I had a dream of her last night;
It seemed I was in Hell;
A listless river past me went,
Of which old poets tell.
And as I watched the slipping stream,
A tress of woman's hair
Was drifted on the languid wave,
And it was golden fair.
Poem fractal
0.009 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.
Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.
I had a dream of her last night;
It seemed I was in Hell;
A listless river past me went,
Of which old poets tell.
And as I watched the slipping stream,
A tress of woman's hair
Was drifted on the languid wave,
And it was golden fair.
The nettle chokes the beaten earth,
The ivy-tree the stone.
The living dead must mind
The walls that were their own.
The living dead must surely mind
The constant stream that spills
Into a granite pool
Between the folding hills.
It twists about, it trickles thro',
And with a hollow sound
It spills into the pool,
And gurgles underground.
Last night, last night, as I came by
The ruins grey and bare,
I heard a human voice
Make music on the air.
For tho' the nettle chokes the earth,
The ivy-tree the stone,
The living dead must mind
The walls that were their own.
I looked, and lo, the driven moon
Hid in a bank of cloud;
And when it shone I saw
A woman in her shroud.
She sang, and washed a wooden churn
All in the water white;
Her hair was in the stream,
Her shroud was spun of light.
She washed, and coloured bubbles foamed
About her fallen hair;
And human laughter rang
Into the icy air.
It seemed the pool was white with feet,
The darkness bright with eyes,
The ruins warm with song,
With laughter and with sighs.
For tho' the nettle chokes the earth,
The ivy-tree the stone,
The living dead must mind
The walls that were their own.
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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