Poem fractal
0.041 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.
0.0132 + 0.3530i
Drawing the boundary…
0.0261 + 0.3142i
Drawing the boundary…
Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.
A pink feather atop of a greying white straw hat,
A peek-a-boo waist and skirt showing a line of stocking
Above white shoes,
Stand in front of a judge
Who leans over a desk of golden oak
And summons forward a sulky, slouching boy.
"You are required by this Court," says the judge,
"To pay over to this woman
One-third of your weekly wage
For the support of your innocent child."
And the clerk of the court calls out
"Next on the docket?"
Fair yellow murderess, whose gilded head
Gleaming with deaths; whose deadly body white,
Writ o’er with secret records of the dead;
Whose tranquil eyes, that hide the dead from sight
Down in their tenderest depth and bluest bloom;
Whose strange unnatural grace, whose prolonged youth,
Are for my death now and the shameful doom
Of all the man I might have been in truth,
Your fell smile, sweetened still, lest I might shun
Its lingering murder, with a kiss for lure,
Is like the fascinating steel that one
Most vengeful in his last revenge, and sure
The victim lies beneath him, passes slow,
Again and oft again before his eyes,
And over all his frame, that he may know
And suffer the whole death before he dies.
Will you not slay me? Stab me; yea, somehow,
Deep in the heart: say some foul word to last,
And let me hate you as I love you now.
Oh, would I might but see you turn and cast
That false fair beauty that you e’en shall lose,
And fall down there and writhe about my feet,
The crooked loathly viper I shall bruise
Through all eternity: —
Nay, kiss me, Sweet!
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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