It must have been for one of us, my own, To drink this cup and eat this bitter bread. Had not my tears upon thy face been shed, Thy tears had dropped on mine; if I alone Did not walk now, thy spirit would have known My loneliness; and did my feet not tread This weary path and steep, thy feet had bled For mine, and thy mouth had for mine made moan:
And so it comforts me, yea, not in vain. To think of thine eternity of sleep; To know thine eyes are tearless though mine weep: And when this cup's last bitterness I drain, One thought shall still its primal sweetness keep, — Thou hadst the peace and I the undying pain.
Exile or Caesar? Death hath solved thy doubt, And made thee certain of thy changeless fate; And thou no more hast wearily to wait, Straining to catch the people's tarrying shout That from unrestful rest would drag thee out, And push thee to those pinnacles of State Round which throng courtly loves, uncourted hate, Servility's applause, and envy's flout. Twice happy boy! though cut off in thy flower, The timeliest doom of all thy race is thine: Saved from the sad alternative, to pine For heights unreached, or icily to tower, Like Alpine crests that only specious shine, And glitter on the lonely peak of Power.
June 1879
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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.