Give me the reed you lean on; if a spear. My hand shall bleed for't as your hand has bled; I will not cover up my sheltered head, While you are houseless in the moonlight here. I must have half your hope and half your fear.
I must go shares in all you drink and eat, Though it be bread of sorrow and cup of tears; Sheaves that you gather are my harvest. Dear, Because I glean beside you down the years. Your shadow's never lonely at your feet.
And though all things turn ashes that were sweet. In deeps below, and in the deeps above you, In moods that strengthen you and moods that weaken, Perplexed hi shadow, led by starry beacon, I go with you, my lover, and I love you.
Think not, because I wonder where you fled, That I would lift a pin to see you there; You may, for me, be prowling anywhere, So long as you show not your little head: No dark and evil story of the dead Would leave you less pernicious or less fair— Not even Lilith, with her famous hair; And Lilith was the devil, I have read.
I cannot hate you, for I loved you then. The woods were golden then. There was a road Through beeches; and I said their smooth feet showed Like yours. Truth must have heard me from afar, For I shall never have to learn again That yours are cloven as no beech's are.
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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.