When you are dead, and your disturbing eyes No more as now their stormy lashes lift To lance me through—as in the morning skies One moment, plainly visible in a rift Of cloud, two splendid planets may appear And purely blaze, and are at once withdrawn, What time the watcher in desire and fear Leans from his chilly window in the dawn— Shall I be free, shall I be once again As others are, and count your loss no care? Oh, never more, till my dissolving brain Be powerless to evoke you out of air, Remembered morning stars, more fiercely bright Than all the Alphas of the actual night!
Is it the tinkling of mandolins which disturbs you? Or the dropping of bitter-orange petals among the coffee-cups? Or the slow creeping of the moonlight between the olive-trees? Drop! drop! the rain Upon the thin plates of my heart.
String your blood to chord with this music, Stir your heels upon the cobbles to the rhythm of a dance-tune. They have slim thighs and arms of silver; The moon washes away their garments; They make a pattern of fleeing feet in the branch shadows, And the green grapes knotted about them Burst as they press against one another. The rain knocks upon the plates of my heart, They are crumpled with its beating.
Would you drink only from your brains, Old Man? See, the moonlight has reached your knees, It falls upon your head in an accolade of silver. Rise up on the music, Fling against the moon-drifts in a whorl of young light bodies: Leaping grape-clusters, Vine leaves tearing from a grey wall. You shall run, laughing, in a braid of women, And weave flowers with the frosty spines of thorns. Why do you gaze into your glass, And jar the spoons with your finger-tapping? The rain is rigid on the plates of my heart. The murmur of it is loud—loud.
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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.