The Vicar's house is smother'd in its roses, His garden glows with dahlias large and new; "Bees murmur in his limes the summer through;" And on the seat beneath them often dozes A better man than Calumny supposes. His living is three hundred pounds a-year; "But not of servants, wife, and children clear." He gives away his common right and closes, And keeps no horse. When winter strips the tree, To poor men's homes his wife and daughters go, With needful gifts of flannel, food, or fire, And made-wines for the sick. Now, would not he, Who deem'd the labourer worth of his hire, Have paid it to his faithful servant?— No.
So Love is dead that has been quick so long! Close, then, his eyes, and bear him to his rest, With eglantine and myrtle on his breast, And leave him there, their pleasant scents among; And chant a sweet and melancholy song About the charms whereof he was possessed, And how of all things he was loveliest, And to compare with aught were him to wrong. Leave him beneath the still and solemn stars, That gather and look down from their far place With their long calm our brief woes to deride, Until the Sun the Morning's gate unbars And mocks, in turn, our sorrows with his face;— And yet, had Love been Love, he had not died.
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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.