Oh, you are more desirable to me Than all I staked in an impulsive hour, Making my youth the sport of chance, to be Blighted or torn in its most perfect flower; For I think less of what that chance may bring Than how, before returning into fire, To make my dearest memory of the thing That is but now my ultimate desire. And in old times I should have prayed to her Whose haunt the groves of windy Cyprus were, To prosper me and crown with good success My will to make of you the rose-twined bowl From whose inebriating brim my soul Shall drink its last of earthly happiness.
I close my eyes and see the inward things: The strange averted spectre of my soul Is sitting undivulged, angelic, whole, Beside the dim internal flood that brings Mysterious thought or dreams or murmurings, From the immense Unknown: beneath him roll The urging formless waves beyond control And darkened by the vague foreshadowings As heretofore; yea, for He hath not stirred. Too weak was that my life, too poor each word To lure my soul from all it waiteth for: —I am with God who holds His purpose still And maketh and remaketh evermore; I am with God and waiting for His will.
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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.