Making this music, let it be for horns Twisted and blackened with a brittle mold, For strings all snapping. Let a singer old Tatter these measures in a breast of thorns.
Speak as you must, and let there be no note Ringing with sedulous felicity. The movement of your soul could never be A swan with summer lightning on its throat.
Since you are ridden in this fatuous way To cull your spirit, as with a gilded shell, And range vagaries in a bland array,— Open, for once, the cavern in the ground Crusting your music's core: that crooked bell. Unsnarl the matted rope, and let it pound.
Green rustlings, more-than-regal charities Drift coolly from that tower of whispered light. Amid the noontide's blazed asperities I watched the sun's most gracious anchorite
Climb up as by communings, year on year Uneaten of the earth or aught earth holds, And the grey trunk, that's elephantine, rear Its frondings sighing in aetherial folds.
Forever fruitless, and beyond that yield Of sweat the jungle presses with hot love And tendril till our deathward breath is sealed— It grazes the horizons, launched above
Mortality—ascending emerald-bright, A fountain at salute, a crown in view— Unshackled, casual of its azured height As though it soared suchwise through heaven too.
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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.