Ah, what is beauty to the sick man's eye? Unto the spirit wintry with despair The promise of the spring? The azure air, The winged pomp of Heaven passing by Into the topmost summer's golden sky? The west-wind breathing in my face is young As once I was, when in my heart there sprung Primrose and violet joys that soonest die. Therefore I think upon my days of prime, Unfailing strength, unquenchable delight, The voices that I heard in that far time, Of love and truth, the eyes that once were bright, And the long vision of the past appears One summer morn, a morn of merry years.
What on Earth deserves our trust? Youth and Beauty both are dust. Long we gathering are with pain, What one moment calls again. Seven years childless marriage past, A Son, a son is born at last: So exactly lim’d and fair, Full of good Spirits, Meen, and Air, As a long life promised, Yet, in less than six weeks dead. Too promising, too great a mind In so small room to be confined: Therefore, as fit in Heaven to dwell, He quickly broke the Prison shell. So the subtle Alchemist, Can’t with Hermes Seal resist The powerful spirit’s subtler flight, But t’will bid him long good night. And so the Sun if it arise Half so glorious as his Eyes, Like this Infant, takes a shrowd, Buried in a morning Cloud.
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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.