Here in this spring, stars float along the void; Here in this ornamental winter Down pelts the naked weather; This summer buries a spring bird.
Symbols are selected from the years’ Slow rounding of four seasons’ coasts, In autumn teach three seasons’ fires And four birds’ notes.
I should tell summer from the trees, the worms Tell, if at all, the winter’s storms Or the funeral of the sun; I should learn spring by the cuckooing, And the slug should teach me destruction.
A worm tells summer better than the clock, The slug’s a living calendar of days; What shall it tell me if a timeless insect Says the world wears away?
"Leap from the crags, brave boy! The musing hills have kept thee long, But they have made thee strong, And fed thee with the fulness of their joy, And given direction that thou might'st return To me who yearn At foot of this great steep— Leap! leap!"
So the stream leapt Into his mother's arms, Who wept A space, Then calmed her sweet alarms, And smiled to see him as he slept, Wrapt in that dear embrace: And with the brooding of her tepid breast Cherished his mountain chillness— O, then—what rest! O, everywhere what stillness!
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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.