Infants' graves are steps of angels, where Earth's brightest gems of innocence repose. God is their parent, and they need no tear; He takes them to His bosom from earth's woes, A bud their lifetime and a flower their close. Their spirits are an Iris of the skies, Needing no prayers; a sunset's happy close. Gone are the bright rays of their soft blue eyes; Flowers weep in dew-drops oer them, and the gale gently sighs
Their lives were nothing but a sunny shower, Melting on flowers as tears melt from the eye. Their deaths were dew-drops on Heaven's amaranth bower, And tolled on flowers as Summer gales went by. They bowed and trembled, and they left no sigh, And the sun smiled to show their end was well. Infants have nought to weep for ere they die; All prayers are needless, beads they need not tell, White flowers their mourners are, Nature their passing bell.
Unseen forever, save by her own boy— And he is love, the ever blind and young, Blind by the light of his own youth out-flung— Venus, the daughter of the whole world's joy, Whom wisdom cannot hide nor years annoy, Like the bright sea whereout her birth is sprung, Still dances to her praise for ever sung, And lives to laugh, to save and to destroy. But now, some say, she has returned again, Being unseen, to her deep sleep in bliss. No, no; while there are women loved of men, As this is loved—and this is loved—and this— Venus returns no more beneath the sea: Seek her not there, for this—and this is she.
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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.