'TIs the island of the orange, of the yucca and the palm, Where the white-armed, laughing beaches lave in coves of foam-edged calm, And the shy flamingo rises like a winged oriflamme.
'Tis the home of endless summer, by cool trade-winds overblown; 'Tis the Eden of the Ocean lying lovely and alone, But trailed over by the serpent, and with sin and ruin sown.
'Tis the island of the mango, the banana and the cane; 'Tis the land of beauty blighted by the spoiler's cruel reign; 'Tis the haunt of vultures flocking to the devastated plain.
'Tis the isle of birds and blossoms, sea-girt realm of bloom and song; Land of yet unconquered freemen who have striven and suffered long; Land awaiting its redemption from four centuries of wrong!
Hear, my belovéd, an old Milesian story!— High, and embosom’d in congregated laurels, Glimmer’d a temple upon a breezy headland; In the dim distance amid the skiey billows Rose a fair island; the god of flocks had blest it. From the far shores of the bleat-resounding island Oft by the moonlight a little boat came floating, Came to the sea cave beneath the breezy headland, Where amid myrtles a pathway stole in mazes Up to the groves of the high embosom’d temple. There in a thicket of dedicated roses, Oft did a priestess, as lovely as a vision, Pouring her soul to the son of Cytherea, Pray him to hover around the slight canoe-boat, And with invisible pilotage to guide it Over the dusk wave, until the nightly sailor Shivering with ecstasy sank upon her bosom.
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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.