When thy beauty appears, In its graces and airs, All bright as an angel new dropt from the sky; At distance I gaze, and am aw'd by my fears So strangely you dazzle my eye!
But when without art, Your kind thoughts you impart, When your love runs in blushes through every vein; When it darts from your eyes, when it pants in your heart, Then I know you're a woman again.
There's a passion and pride In our sex, she replied, And thus (might I gratify both) I would do; Still an angel appear to each lover beside, But still be a woman to you.
Our love was all arrayed in pleasantness, A tender little love that sighed and smiled At little happy nothings, like a child, A dainty little love in fancy dress.
But now the love that once was half in play Has come to be this grave and piteous thing. Why did you leave me all this suffering For all your memory when you went away?
You might have played the play out, O my friend, Closing upon a kiss our comedy. Or is it, then, a fault of taste in me, Who like no tragic exit at the end?
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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.