When acorns fall and swallows troop for flight, And hope matured slow mellows to regret, And Autumn, pressed by Winter for his debt, Drops leaf on leaf till she be beggared quite; Should then the crescent moon's unselfish light Gleam up the sky, just as the sun doth set, Her brightening gaze, though day and dark have met, Prolongs the gloaming and retards the night. So, fair young life, new risen upon mine Just as it owns the edict of decay And Fancy's fires should pale and pass away, My menaced glory takes a glow from thine, And, in the deepening sundown of my day, Thou with thy dawn delayest my decline.
It is not to be thought of that the Flood Of British freedom, which, to the open sea Of the world's praise, from dark antiquity Hath flowed, “with pomp of waters, unwithstood,” Roused though it be full often to a mood Which spurns the check of salutary bands, That this most famous Stream in bogs and sands Should perish; and to evil and to good Be lost for ever. In our halls is hung Armoury of the invincible Knights of old: We must be free or die, who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold Which Milton held.—In every thing we are sprung Of Earth’s first blood, have titles manifold.
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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.