A bell tolls on in my heart As though in my ears a knell Had ceased for awhile to swell, But the sense of it would not part From the spirit that bears its part In the chime of the soundless bell.
Ah dear dead singer of sorrow, The burden is now not thine That grief bade sound for a sign Through the songs of the night whose morrow Has risen, and I may not borrow A beam from its radiant shrine.
The burden has dropped from thee That grief on thy life bound fast; The winter is over and past Whose end thou wast fain to see. Shall sorrow not comfort me That is thine no longer—at last?
Good day, good night, and good morrow, Men living and mourning say. For thee we could only pray That night of the day might borrow Such comfort as dreams lend sorrow: Death gives thee at last good day.
The nightingale has a lyre of gold, The lark's is a clarion call, And the blackbird plays but a boxwood flute, But I love him best of all.
For his song is all of the joy of life, And we in the mad, spring weather, We two have listened till he sang Our hearts and lips together.
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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.