Since, on a quiet night, I heard them talk Who have no voices but the winds’ Of all the mystery there is in life And all the mastery there is in death, I have not lain an hour asleep But troubled by their curious speech Stealing so softly into the ears. One says: There was a woman with no friend, And, standing over the sea, she’d cry Her loneliness across the empty waves Time after time. And every voice: Oblivion is as loverless; Oblivion is as loverless. And then again: There was a child Upon the earth who knew no joy, For there was no light in his eyes, And there was no light in his soul. Oblivion is as blind, Oblivion is as blind, I hear them say out of the darkness Who have no talk but that of death.
How sweet it were, if without feeble fright, Or dying of the dreadful beauteous sight, An angel came to us, and we could bear To see him issue from the silent air At evening in our room, and bend on ours His divine eyes, and bring us from his bowers News of dear friends, and children who have never Been dead indeed, — as we shall know for ever. Alas! we think not what we daily see About our hearths, — angels, that are to be. Or may be if they will, and we prepare Their souls and ours to meet in happy air; — A child, a friend, a wife whose soft heart sings In unison with ours, breeding its future wings.
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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.