Desire
Who never wanted, — maddest joy
Remains to him unknown:
The banquet of abstemiousness
Surpasses that of wine.
Within its hope, though yet ungrasped
Desire's perfect goal,
No nearer, lest reality
Should disenthrall thy soul.
Poem fractal
0.005 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.
Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.
Who never wanted, — maddest joy
Remains to him unknown:
The banquet of abstemiousness
Surpasses that of wine.
Within its hope, though yet ungrasped
Desire's perfect goal,
No nearer, lest reality
Should disenthrall thy soul.
The cup of joy is found,
A shallow draught and vain;
The cup of joy! but who shall sound
The secret gulfs of pain?
The mystery of death—
The mystery of birth—
The hourly groans that rise like breath
From this bewildered earth,
Grow wild and wilder still
In that expiring light,
Whose living lustre once could fill
The ghastliness of night.
Alas! the star which poured
Belief on pastoral men,
Through ages not in vain adored,
Sets ne'er to rise agen.
And over earth is spread
A grim rëentering gloom;
Whilst doubts and fears contemned as dead
Their ancient strength resume.
Sitting in sullen state
Upon his joyless throne,
Daily becomes the sage's fate,
More intimately known.
With all that heaven could shower
Of gifts esteemed the best;
Health, wisdom, beauty, wealth and power,
Only the unending rest
Of death seemed good to him;
Yea better still to keep,
For ever in the regions dim
Of ante-natal sleep;
But yet, however wise,
Oh man! believe him not;
The noble realm of duty lies
Within thy clouded lot.
Following her steady beam
Across the waste abyss,
Taint not thy spirit with the dream
Of future bale or bliss.
It well may be that God
Sends immortality,
Earthwards from his unknown abode,
To summon those who die.
And if when life is o'er
Our fate is fixèd so,
Beyond the sable ocean's shore,
We soon enough shall know.
Still let not hope debase,
Nor horrors overawe,
Our love for her celestial face,
Whose name is truth and law.
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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