"To-day," I thought, "I will not plan nor strive; Idle as yon blue sky, or clouds that go Like loitering ships, with sails as white as snow, I simply will be glad to be alive." For, year by year, in steady summer glow The flowers had bloomed, and life had stored its hive, But tasted not the honey. Quite to thrive, The flavor of my thrift I now would know. But the good breeze blew in a friend — a boon At any hour. There was a book to show, A gift to take, a slender one to give. The morning passed to mellow afternoon, And that to twilight; it was sleep-time soon,— And lo! again I had forgot to live.
Brave as a falcon and as merciless, With bright eyes watching still the world, thy prey, I saw thee pass in thy lone majesty, Untamed, unmated, high above the press. The dull crowd gazed at thee. It could not guess The secret of thy proud aérial way, Or read in thy mute face the soul which lay A prisoner there in chains of tenderness. —Lo, thou art captured. In my hand to-day I hold thee, and awhile thou deignest to be Pleased with my jesses. I would fain beguile My foolish heart to think thou lovest me. See, I dare not love thee quite. A little while And thou shalt sail back heavenwards. Woe is me!
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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.