Query—A Musician speaks
How can one sky hold night and day,
Sun and snow?
How can one heart hold love and passion.
Friend and foe?
How can one rose hold flower and thorn,
Bloom and death?
How can music hold these and more?—
Is it God's breath?
Poem fractal
0.022 apart. A smaller distance means the lines are built more alike.
This number is read from the build of the lines. The bright edge is that number, carried outward until the pattern repeats.
−0.3180 − 0.7762i
Drawing the boundary…
−0.3342 − 0.7608i
Drawing the boundary…
Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.
How can one sky hold night and day,
Sun and snow?
How can one heart hold love and passion.
Friend and foe?
How can one rose hold flower and thorn,
Bloom and death?
How can music hold these and more?—
Is it God's breath?
I stood amongst the corn, and watched
The evening coming down.
The rising vale was like a queen,
And the dim church her crown.
Crown-like it stood against the hills.
Its form was passing fair.
I almost saw the tribes go up
To offer incense there.
And far below the long vale stretched.
As a sleeper she did seem
That after some brief restlessness
Has now begun to dream.
(All day the wakefulness of men,
Their lives and labours brief,
Have broken her long troubled sleep.
Now, evening brings relief.)
There was no motion there, nor sound.
She did not seem to rise.
Yet was she wrapping herself in
Her grey of night-disguise.
For now no church nor tree nor fold
Was visible to me:
Only that fading into one
Which God must sometimes see.
No coloured glory streaked the sky
To mark the sinking sun.
There was no redness in the west
To tell that day was done.
Only, the greyness of the eve
Grew fuller than before.
And, in its fulness, it made one
Of what had once been more.
There was much beauty in that sight
That man must not long see.
God dropped the kindly veil of night
Between its end and me.
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.
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.
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.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.