Poem fractal
0.024 apart. A smaller distance means the lines are built more alike.
This number is read from the build of the lines. The bright edge is that number, carried outward until the pattern repeats.
0.0800 − 0.0949i
Drawing the boundary…
0.0760 − 0.0710i
Drawing the boundary…
Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.
When the voices of children are heard on the green,
And whisperings are in the dale,
The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,
My face turns green and pale.
Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,
And the dews of night arise;
Your spring and your day are wasted in play,
And your winter and night in disguise.
On A New York evening of thin tedium
A woman with blue eyes and some feeling read
A poem; while the city like a drum
Heavied her voice. Casually, she was dead
A little later. I recall and cannot find
The poem. It was a poem then,
About a clock that ticked and would unwind
In an old house, and strike out nine or ten
While sparrows chaffered and feathered on outside.
By Thomas Hardy. Three quatrains.
We were not friends. We were polite. She died
In a meagre way, I think, of minor pains…
And in the deckle edges of his thick
Books I have looked, but I cannot find
The poem. Still the clock does tick
Somewhere, and the springs unwind.
(And the insignificant woman, and the dull, polite
Evening…the subway crammed and stale…. )
Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight, goodnight, goodnight,
Woman and poem in limbo.
Detail, detail,
Of the infallible city of our failure, drawn to scale.
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.
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.
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.
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