She sat where he had left her all alone, With head bent back, and eyes through love on flame; And neck half flushed with most delicious shame; With hair disordered, and with loosened zone, — She sat, and to herself made tender moan, As yet again in thought her lover came. And caught her by her hands and called her name. And sealed her body as her soul his own.
The June, moon-stricken twilight, warm, and fair. Closed round her where she sat 'neath voiceless trees. Full of the wonder of triumphant prayer, And sense of unimagined ecstasies Which must be hers, she knows, yet knows not why; But feels thereof his kiss the prophecy.
The heaven and its glories bright above; The earth with Nature's beauties here below; The wondrous light of day and veiling shades Of night; the glowing sun; the flick'ring moon; The lofty planets and the tiny stars; The eagle up amid the cloudy mists; The little fish down in the whirling deep; The wisdom's treasures of the very myth Of Time; the best that ever will—or can E'er nestle in the very purest soul Of Thine own imaged man—lo, all is Thine!
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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.