Morocco conquering homage paid to Spain And the Alhambra lifted up its towers! Africa's fingers tipped with miracles, And quivering with Arabian designs, Traced words and figures like exotic flowers, Sultanas' chambers of rare tapestries, Filigree marvels from Koranic lines, Mosaics chanting notes like tropic rain.
And Spain repaid the tribute ages after: To Tetuan, that fort of struggle and strife, Where chagrined Andalusian Moors retired, She brought a fountain bubbling with new life, Whose jewelled charm won even the native pride, And filled it sparkling with flamenco laughter.
And yet I am as one who looks behind, A traveller in a shadowed land astray, Passing and lost upon the boundary Of actual things, who turns against the wind, An hundred simulacral ghosts to find Close following, an hundred pairs of eyes Shining around like phosphorescent flies,— And all of them himself, yet changed in kind.
Those once I was, which of them now am I? Not one, all alien, long-abandoned masks, That in some witches' sabbath long since past, Did dance awhile in my life's panoply, And drank with me from out of the same flasks; Am I not rid of these, not even at last?
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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.