The wall of his environment, Altho' Chinese was not so high He could not see tiled roofs of kings Like dragon-backs against the sky. And so spurred on by discontent, An eagle pen that lent him wings Transported him across the wall To tea in gardens with the Mings.
Thus staged, his long but static fall Made drama for ancestral ghosts, Whose proud transgressions raised the wall Of ego, which with echoed boasts Had in past epochs starved their souls With windy oats of self-applause, Till they had met great grandpapas Twit-tittering on the seething coals.
Endlessly fell her chestnut flowers, Faint snow throughout the honeyed dark; The myrtle spread his boughs to drink Deep draughts of salt from the sea's brink, And like a moon-dial swung her tower's Straight shadow o'er her warded park.
From her calm coasts the galleons fled, The fisher steered him farther west, No port was hailed, no keel came home Across that pale, enchanted foam, But by her roof the thrushes fed And wandering swallows found their rest.
The shadows touched her tenderly, The red beam lingered on her dress; The white gull and the osprey knew Her tower across the leagues of blue. The wild swan when he sought the sea Was laggard through her loveliness.
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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.