The glorious portrait of that Angel's face, Made to amaze weak men's confused skill, And this world's worthless glory to embase, What pen, what pencil, can express her fill? For, though he colours could devise at will, And eke his learned hand at pleasure guide, Lest, trembling, it his workmanship should spill; Yet many wondrous things there are beside: The sweet eye-glances, that like arrows glide, The charming smiles, that rob sense from the heart, The lovely pleasance, and the lofty pride, Cannot expressed be by any art. A greater craftsman's hand thereto doth need, That can express the life of things indeed.
Far from all measured space, yet clear and plain As sun at noon, ‘a mighty orb of song’ Illumes extremest Heaven. Beyond the throng Of lesser stars, that rise, and wax, and wane, The transient rulers of the fickle main, One steadfast light gleams through the dark, and long, And narrowing aisle of memory. How strong, How fortified with all the numerous train Of human truths, Great Poet of thy kind, Wert thou, whose verse, capacious as the sea, And various as the voices of the wind, Swell’d with the gladness of the battle’s glee — And yet could glorify infirmity, When Priam wept, or shame-struck Helen pined.
—
—
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.