What time the mighty moon was gathering light Love paced the thymy plots of Paradise, And all about him roll’d his lustrous eyes; When, turning round a cassia, full in view Death, walking all alone beneath a yew, And talking to himself, first met his sight: “You must begone,” said Death, “these walks are mine”. Love wept and spread his sheeny vans for flight; Yet ere he parted said, “This hour is thine; Thou art the shadow of life, and as the tree Stands in the sun and shadows all beneath, So in the light of great eternity Life eminent creates the shade of death; The shadow passeth when the tree shall fall, But I shall reign for ever over all”.
I, poor romantic, held her heel Upon the island of my palm, And saw towards her tiny face Going her glistening calves that minute. There was a purpose in her pointed foot; Her thighs and underclothes were sweet, And drew my spiral breath To circumambulate for decency Their golden and their other colour. The band was playing on the balcony. One lady’s hand was lifted, But she did not cry, ‘I see; I see the man is mad with love.’ Her fan burst in a million lights As that her heel was lifted, Gone from my palm to leave it marked With quite a kind of heart. She is on dancing toes again, Sparkling a twelve-legged body And many arms to raise Over her heel and me. I, poor romantic, contemplate The insect on this painted tree. Which is the metal wing And which the real?
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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.