Poem fractal
0.017 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.
−0.4717 − 0.5300i
Drawing the boundary…
−0.4767 − 0.5136i
Drawing the boundary…
Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.
The sky of brightest gray seems dark
To one whose sky was ever white.
To one who never knew a spark,
Thro' all his life, of love or light,
The grayest cloud seems over-bright.
The robin sounds a beggar's note
Where one the nightingale has heard,
But he for whom no silver throat
Its liquid music ever stirred,
Deems robin still the sweetest bird.
The gray wind out of the West
Is sighing and making moan,
For a noinin's silver crest
In the hay-swathes overthrown.
Like the heart in a dying breast,
It flutters, making its moan,
The gray wind out of the West.
The black wind out of the North
Blows loud, like a cry of war:
Its voice goes gallantly forth
In fields where the spearsmen are:
To them is its voice not worth
Wild music of any star?
The black wind out of the North.
The white wind out of the South,
It makes not for war nor peace:
'Tis the breath of a colleen's mouth,
Yet it flutters the willow-trees:
It burns men's souls with drouth,
Then fills their souls with ease:
The white wind out of the South.
The red wind out of the East —
What word can a harper say
Of the wind that blows from the feast,
And blows men into the fray:
It will not stay for the priest,
For the Host it will not stay —
The red wind blowing out of the East,
The wind of the Judgment Day.
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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