Walking in gardens by the sides Of marble bathers toeing the garden ponds, Skirting the ordered beds of paint-box flowers, We spoke of drink and girls, for hours Touched on the outskirts of the mind, Then stirred a little chaos in the sun. A new divinity, a god of wheels Destroying souls and laying waste, Trampling to dust the bits and pieces Of faulty men and their diseases, Rose in our outworn brains. We spoke our lines, Made, for the bathers to admire, Dramatic gestures in the air. Ruin and revolution Whirled in our words, then faded. We might have tried light matches in the wind. Over and round the ordered garden hummed, There was no need of a new divinity, No tidy flower moved, no bather gracefully Lifted her marble foot, or lowered her hand To brush upon the waters of the pond.
O learned man who never learned to learn, Save to deduce, by timid steps and small, From towering smoke that fire can never burn And from tall tales that men were never tall. Say, have you thought what manner of man it is Of whom men say 'He could strike giants down'? Or what strong memories over time's abyss Bore up the pomp of Camelot and the crown. And why one banner all the background fills, Beyond the pageants of so many spears, And by what witchery in the western hills A throne stands empty for a thousand years. Who hold, unheeding this immense impact, Immortal story for a mortal sin; Lest human fable touch historic fact, Chase myths like moths, and fight them with a pin. Take comfort; rest—there needs not this ado. You shall not be a myth, I promise you.
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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.