Lay me where soft Cyrene rambles down In grove and garden to the sapphire sea; Twine yellow roses for the drinker's crown; Let music reach and fair heads circle me, Watching blue ocean where the white sails steer Fruit-laden forth or with the wares and news Of merchant cities seek our harbors here, Careless how Corinth fares, how Syracuse; But here, with love and sleep in her caress, Warm night shall sink and utterly persuade The gentle doctrine Aristippus bare, — Night-winds, and one whose white youth's loveliness, In a flowered balcony beside me laid, Dreams, with the starlight on her fragrant hair.
As when into the garden paths by night One bears a lamp, and with its sickly glare Scatters the burnished flowers a-dreaming there, Palely they show like spectres in his sight, Lovely no more, disfurnished of delight, Some folded up and drooping o'er the way, Their odours spent, their colour changed to gray, Some that stood queen-like in the morning light Fallen discrowned: so the low-burning loves That tremble in the hearts of aged men Cast their own light upon the world that moves Around them, and receive it back again. Old joys seem dead, old faces without joys; Laughter is dead. There is no mirth in boys.
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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.