There’s plenty in the world that doth not die, And much that lives to perish, That rises and then falls, buds but to wither; The season’s sun, though he should know his setting Up to the second of the dark coming, Death sights and sees with great misgiving A rib of cancer on the fluid sky. But we, shut in the houses of the brain, Brood on each hothouse plant Spewing its sapless leaves around, And watch the hand of time unceasingly Ticking the world away, Shut in the madhouse call for cool air to breathe. There’s plenty that doth die; Time cannot heal nor resurrect; And yet, mad with young blood or stained with age, We still are loth to part with what remains, Feeling the wind about our heads that does not cool, And on our lips the dry mouth of the rain.
This Sycamore, oft musical with bees— Such tents the Patriarchs loved! O long unharmed May all its agéd boughs o’er-canopy The small round basin, which this jutting stone Keeps pure from falling leaves! Long may the Spring, Quietly as a sleeping infant’s breath, Send up cold waters to the traveler With soft and even pulse! Nor ever cease Yon tiny cone of sand its soundless dance, Which at the bottom, like a Fairy’s Page, As merry and no taller, dances still, Nor wrinkles the smooth surface of the Fount. Here Twilight is and Coolness: here is moss, A soft seat, and a deep and ample shade. Thou may’st toil far and find no second tree. Drink, Pilgrim, here; here rest! and if thy heart Be innocent, here too shalt thou refresh Thy spirit, listening to some gentle sound, Or passing gale or hum of murmuring bees!
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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.