O world, how I have loved you! And you have stripped me and scourged me; Yet have I loved you, And my heart has been full of you. I hear you say, "Who are you That we should care for your love?" I answer, "I am nothing, But I loved you." And I answer again, "I am nothing, But I have reached my hand to the lowest, And I have sat with want That the weak might be nourished, And the lonely filled with love." Each one of you would I have folded in my arms, Not in the public place in view of eyes, But on the unseen path of every day, For my heart was full of you, My lips blooming with wild, sweet songs at morn, And softer strains in evening's twilight hour. But you stripped me and scourged me. Now silent I sit afraid.
Fayre eyes, the myrrour of my mazed hart, what wondrous vertue is contaynd in you, the which both lyfe and death forth from you dart into the obiect of your mighty view? For when ye mildly looke with louely hew, then is my soule with life and loue inspired but when ye lowre, or looke on me askew, then doe I die, as one with lightning fyred. But since that lyfe is more then death desyred, looke euer louely, as becomes you best, that your bright beams of my weak eies admyred, may kindle liuing fire within my brest. Such life should be the honor of your light, such death the sad ensample of your might.
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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.