Hayle! whom The Diamonds proclayme their King; Crowning as Peeres, as Guards envyroning; Hayle! whom the rising Sunne where thou wert borne, Invested in the purple of the Morne, And his owne Beames; whilst thee my verse displayes Thou swell'st at once, and blushest at thy praise. Like a red Sea thy trembling Mount of blood Stands off i'th'ayre and threats a Crimson flood Over the Golden bancks, whilst our dimm'd sight Mistakes for flowing waves thy floating light. Or as in Wine the subtile spirits move, Making ev'n Temperance her selfe in love; So rowles thy fiery and bewitching Eye, Able to shake a vow of Poverty. But oh, how like my Cruell faire thou art? Thy panting stone is her obdurate heart Pegg'd in with Diamonds: or signifies Her Lipp, severely guarded by her Eyes.
Because I believed God brought him to me, And because I believed him gifted of God With honor, truth and love of the right, I believed in God and worshipped God. And then when I found he was just a thief, And full of treasons and perjuries, All for money and worldly pride, The wreck of him was the wreck of God; And so I fainted amid the ruins Of plaster and sticks, and sat in the stillness That followed the fallen bust of God. Friends, it is folly to prison God In any house that is built with hands, In man or woman, or passionate hopes, Or the love of Truth, or the Rock of Ages. For all will change, deceive or crumble, As soon as you think you have prisoned God. For God is Proteus, and flies like magic From earth to heaven, from hope to hope. You never can catch Him, and this is the reason: The game of the soul is never to find, The game of the soul is to follow!
—
—
0:00
0:00
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.