The Lost Jewel
I held a jewel in my fingers
And went to sleep.
The day was warm, and winds were prosy;
I said: "'T will keep."
I woke and chid my honest fingers, —
The gem was gone;
And now an amethyst remembrance
Is all I own.
Poem fractal
0.012 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.
−0.2014 − 0.8134i
Drawing the boundary…
−0.2058 − 0.8021i
Drawing the boundary…
Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.
I held a jewel in my fingers
And went to sleep.
The day was warm, and winds were prosy;
I said: "'T will keep."
I woke and chid my honest fingers, —
The gem was gone;
And now an amethyst remembrance
Is all I own.
Nature had long a treasure made,
Of all her choicest store,
Fearing, when she should be decayed,
To beg in vain for more.
Her orientest colours there,
And essences most pure,
With sweetest perfumes hoarded were,
All, as she thought, secure,
She seldom them unlocked or used
But with the nicest care;
For, with one grain of them diffused,
She could the world repair.
But likeness soon together drew,
What she did separate lay;
Of which one perfect beauty grew,
And that was Celia.
Love wisely had of long foreseen
That he must once grow old,
And therefore stored a magazine
To save him from the cold.
He kept the several cells replete
With nitre thrice refined,
The naphtha’s and the sulphur’s heat,
And all that burns the mind.
He fortified the double gate,
And rarely thither came;
For, with one spark of these, he straight
All nature could inflame.
Till, by vicinity so long,
A nearer way they sought,
And, grown magnetically strong,
Into each other wrought.
Thus all his fuel did unite
To make one fire high:
None ever burned so hot, so bright:
And, Celia, that am I.
So we alone the happy rest,
Whilst all the world is poor,
And have within ourselves possessed
All love's and nature’s store.
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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