God, you complain, gave you a pretty face— And that, you half imply, explains it all; Your sudden rise and still more sudden fall; The flashy triumph and half-proud disgrace. Bitter, but still resolved to keep your place, You mock at signs of faith and honor, call Life an unmeaning farce, a madman's brawl, And lay it all on Him, in any case.
But why blame God? Is it His fault again? He knows, it seems, little of needs or goals; God's a haphazard giver, and all men Grow careless with their battered aureoles. He made you with a pretty face…. But then, God can not make us all with pretty souls.
O sky, thou art far too blue! Pine for the sweet soft rain the tremulous ferns And the scorched grasses and the blossom-urns, Ay, in his lonely glade the great oak yearns: Even water-lilies swoon In the long languid noon, Since slow and shallow is the streamlet's lymph, Home of the Naiad nymph: O sterile sky, yield thy refreshing dew!
O love, thou art far too gay! Thy lips laugh always and thy bright eyes shine, And both are mine, you darling, both are mine, And love is sweeter than the summer's wine: Yet, even in thy sleep, Just for a moment weep, Or let some fanciful and foolish fears Soften those eyes with tears. O love, I want some tears to kiss away!
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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.