Within the hollow silence of the night I lay awake and listened. I could hear Planet with punctual planet chiming clear, And unto star star cadencing aright. Nor these alone: cloistered from deafening sight, All things that are, made music to my ear: Hushed woods, dumb caves, and many a soundless mere, With Arctic mains in rigid sleep locked tight. But ever with this chant from shore and sea, From singing constellation, humming thought, And life through time's stops blowing variously, A melancholy undertone was wrought; And from its boundless prison-house I caught The awful wail of lone Eternity.
Who first invented work, and bound the free And holiday-rejoicing spirit down To the ever-haunting importunity Of business in the green fields, and the town — To plough, loom, anvil, spade — and (oh most sad!) To that dry drudgery at the desk’s dead wood? Who but the Being unblest, alien from good, Sabbathless Satan! he who his unglad Task ever plies ’mid rotatory burnings, That round and round incalculably reel — For wrath Divine hath made him like a wheel — In that red realm from which are no returnings: Where toiling and turmoiling ever and aye He, and his thoughts, keep pensive working-day.
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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.