If flowers had ghosts, that thin perfume Of buds long picked should haunt your room — Your room that dreams in ancient way, Where beaux have knelt with Spring's bouquet For belles in silk of Jacquard's loom:
When wintry fields are bare of bloom They'd come a-tremble from the tomb; You'd love them when the skies were grey, If flowers had ghosts!
So now, when April fires the broom And cowslips clamber up the coomb, You would not — this I greatly pray — Forget the friends of yesterday, Who spoke of her in days of gloom, If flowers had ghosts?
There is a garden in her face, Where roses and white lilies grow; A heavenly paradise is that place, Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow. There cherries grow, which none may buy Till "Cherry ripe" themselves do cry.
Those cherries fairly do enclose Of orient pearl a double row, Which when her lovely laughter shows, They look like rosebuds filled with snow. Yet them nor peer nor prince can buy Till "Cherry ripe" themselves do cry.
Her eyes like angels watch them still; Her brows like bended bows do stand, Threatening with piercing frowns to kill All that attempt, with eye or hand, Those sacred cherries to come nigh Till "Cherry ripe" themselves do cry.
—
—
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.