Hearing your words, and not a word among them Tuned to my liking, on a salty day When inland woods were pushed by winds that flung them Hissing to leeward like a ton of spray, I thought how off Matinicus the tide Came pounding in, came running through the Gut, While from the Rock the warning whistle cried, And children whimpered, and the doors blew shut; There in the autumn when the men go forth, With slapping skirts the island women stand In gardens stripped and scattered, peering north, With dahlia tubers dripping from the hand: The wind of their endurance, driving south, Flattened your words against your speaking mouth.
Through torrid entrances, past icy poles A hand moves on the page! Who shall again Engrave such hazards as thy might controls— Conflicting, purposeful yet outcry vain Of all our days, being pilot,—tempest, too! Sheets that mock lust and thorns that scribble hate Are lifted from torn flesh with human rue, And laughter, burnished brighter than our fate Thou wieldest with such tears that every faction Swears high in Hamlet's throat, and devils throng Where angels beg for doom in ghast distraction —And fail, both! Yet thine Ariel holds his song: And that serenity that Prospero gains Is justice that has cancelled earthly chains.
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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.