Thy food my body, and my blood thy wine; My soul, too, thine, to tread beneath thy feet: While thus my hair is gold and my breast sweet, Most rapturous is this shameful life of mine. But time must come, between my life and thine, When I must leave the heaven of this heat, And through the cold, gray twilight go to meet That night wherein no stars nor moon may shine.
A rose, then, withered by fierce passion's sun, Left soiled and trampled in the public way; A broken wine-cup emptied of delight: Yet would I not, to triumph o'er that day, Give up one wild, sweet moment of this night, That finds once more love's tune of joy begun.
And can I give thee nothing, oh, my queen? Have I no gifts to cast down at thy feet, — No crown which for thy wearing might be meet? Yet, when thy hand my hands I take between, When round my neck thine arms encircling lean. When 'neath thy quickening kiss, prolonged and sweet. My heart, on fire, seems audibly to beat, And yearn to thine so distant and serene,
I feel that it is better as it is; Better that all the glory should be thine. Than I, indeed, should give thee bliss for bliss. While things are thus, one gift may yet be mine; But couldst thou love me once as I love thee, Giftless indeed, beloved, I should be.
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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.