Yes, nightingale and cuckoo! it was meet That you should come together; for ye twain Are emblems of the rapture and the pain That in the April of our life compete, Until we know not which is the more sweet, Nor yet have learned that both of them are vain! Yet wherefore, nightingale! break off thy strain, While yet the cuckoo doth his call repeat? Not so with me. To sweet woe did I cling Long after echoing happiness was dead, And so found solace. Now, alas! the sting! Cuckoo and nightingale alike have fled; Neither for joy nor sorrow do I sing, And autumn silence gathers in their stead.
Am I a prisoner? What have I done?… What is this silence and this heavy door? Suppose 'tis bolted and I go out no more? I sweat all over and I seem like one Hid in a dungeon by some cruel king. There is an evil in this atmosphere. Here is the sudden thrust of swordlike fear. The air seems full of subtle reasoning. What web of craft here weaves its rich design! With sighs of men forgotten! What prayers are these! Some whispering of things strange and malign Masters my will with cruel images! Now fierce magnetic energies constrain My flesh to shake and all but freeze my brain.
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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.