The land is alight with the sword and the arrow, The light, long arrow, the fire of the bow — The need-fires blaze upon hill and barrow And fire and fuming as sisters go. From open sea to the fjord that's narrow, The longships dart through the rain of stones — A bowman loosens his shining arrow, It leaps to its mark — and a woman moans.
As fire through the forest sweeps the Viking, As fire's the flight of his long, light dart: As molten fire is the sunlight, striking On the golden harness that shields his heart. With fire and flaming from breast to barrow, From dusk to darkness the Vikings go: As Thor's own bolt is the flying arrow, The light, long arrow, the fire of the bow.
I saw the day lean o'er the world's sharp edge And peer into night's chasm, dark and damp; High in his hand he held a blazing lamp, Then dropped it and plunged headlong down the ledge.
With lurid splendor that swift paled to gray, I saw the dim skies suddenly flush bright. 'Twas but the expiring glory of the light Flung from the hand of the adventurous day.
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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.