Beneath the sod where smiling creep The daisies into view, The ashes of an Infant sleep, Whose soul’s as smiling too; Ah! doubly happy, doubly blest, (Had I so happy been!) Recall’d to heaven’s eternal rest, Ere it knew how to sin.
Thrice happy Infant! great the bliss Alone reserv’d for thee; Such joy ’twas my sad fate to miss, And thy good luck to see; For oh! when all must rise again, And sentence then shall have, What crowds will wish with me, in vain, They’d fill’d an infant’s grave.
We have been friends together, In sunshine and in shade; Since first beneath the chesnut trees In infancy we played. But coldness dwells within thy heart, A cloud is on thy brow; We have been friends together — Shall a light word part us now?
We have been gay together; We have laughed at little jests; For the fount of hope was gushing Warm and joyous in our breasts. But laughter now hath fled thy lip, And sullen glooms thy brow; We have been gay together — Shall a light word part us now?
We have been sad together, We have wept with bitter tears, O’er the grass-grown graves, where slumbered The hopes of early years. The voices which are silent there Would bid thee clear thy brow; We have been sad together — Oh! What shall part us now?
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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.