The cunning moment curves its claws Round the body of our curious wish, But push a shoulder through its straitened laws— Then are you hooked to wriggle like a fish.
Lean in high middle 'twixt two tapering points, Yet rocks and undulations control The agile brain, the limber joints The sinews of the soul.
Chaos that coincides, form that refutes all sway, Shapes to the eye quite other to the touch, All twisted things continue to our clay Like added limbs and hair dispreaded overmuch.
And after it draws in its claws The rocks and unquiet sink to a flat ground. Then follow desert hours, the vacuous pause Till some mad indignation unleashes the hound.
And those flat hours and dead unseeing things Cower and crowd and burrow for us to use, Where sundry gapings spurn and preparing wings And O! our hands would use all ere we lose.
At the creation of the Earth Pleasure, that divinest birth, From the soil of Heaven did rise, Wrapped in sweet wild melodies— Like an exhalation wreathing To the sound of air low-breathing Through Aeolian pines, which make A shade and shelter to the lake Whence it rises soft and slow; Her life-breathing [limbs] did flow In the harmony divine Of an ever-lengthening line Which enwrapped her perfect form With a beauty clear and warm.
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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.