The mandrake root! Your face is grey as iron; Your eyes are chilled with something dead and bleak; You have the pride in sorrow that Lord Byron Enchanted London with. And for a week
You've fumbled through the leaves and touched the quick Of this despairing plant and felt it crack Between your nervous fingers. Are you sick?— For mandrakes are an aphrodisiac.
O, come. This will not do. The feeble note You play is like a drop within a cup No louder than the pulses in your throat That bid you now to pull this damned thing up.
One root is in your heart; the other, in The heart you filled and emptied with a curse… A sturdy pull and everything that's been Will merely echo that it might be worse.
The mandrake root! O pull it up forever And fling its bleeding leaves upon the ground, And understand that Time is like a river That washes hollow wounds without a sound.
Can you paint a thought? or number Every fancy in a slumber? Can you count soft minutes roving From a dial's point by moving? Can you grasp a sigh? or, lastly, Rob a virgin's honour chastely? No, oh no! yet you may Sooner do both that and this, This and that, and never miss, Than by any praise display Beauty's beauty; such a glory, As beyond all fate, all story, All arms, all arts, All loves, all hearts, Greater than those, or they, Do, shall, and must obey.
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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.