"And are these cold, light words your last?" he said, And rose, his face made pale with outraged love. She answered gayly, "Are they not enough?" And lightly laughed until his spirit bled, While snake-like on his grief her beauty fed. He looked upon her face once more for proof; Then through and through his lips the sharp teeth drove, Till with the bitter dew of blood made red.
At length he said, "And so 'twas but a jest, — A well-conceived, well-executed plan; Yet now may God forgive you, if God can!" And, passing, left her calm and self-possessed. She watched him cross the lawn with eyes bent low. Where she had kissed his face one hour ago.
The silver swan, who living had no note, When death approached unlocked her silent throat; Leaning her breast against the reedy shore, Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more: Farewell, all joys; O death, come close mine eyes; More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.
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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.