Poor, melancholy bird—that all night long Tell'st to the Moon thy tale of tender woe; From what sad cause can such sweet sorrow flow, And whence this mournful melody of song? Thy poet's musing fancy would translate What mean the sounds that swell thy little breast, When still at dewy eve thou leav'st thy nest, Thus to the listening night to sing thy fate? Pale Sorrow's victims wert thou once among, Though now released in woodlands wild to rove? Say—hast thou felt from friends some cruel wrong, Or died'st thou—martyr of disastrous love? Ah! songstress sad! that such my lot might be, To sigh and sing at Liberty—like thee!
Whereas at morning in a jeweled crown I bit my fingers and was hard to please, Having shook disaster till the fruit fell down I feel tonight more happy and at ease; Feet running in the corridors, men quick— Buckling their sword-belts bumping down the stair, Challenge, and rattling bridge-chain, and the click Of hooves on pavement—this will clear the air. Private this chamber as it has not been In many a month of muffled hours; almost, Lulled by the uproar, I could lie serene And sleep, until all’s won, until all’s lost, And the door’s opened and the issue shown, And I walk forth Hell’s mistress…or my own.
—
—
0:00
0:00
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.