You are the ruler of this realm of flesh, And this hill of bone and hair Moves to the Mahomet of your hand. But all this land gives off a charnel stench, The wind smacks of the poor Dumb dead the crannies house and hide.
You rule the thudding heart that bites the side; The heart steps to death’s finger, The brain acts to the legal dead. Why should I think on death when you are ruler?
You are my flesh’s ruler whom I treason, Housing death in your kingdom, Paying heed to the thirsty voice.
Condemn me to an everlasting facing Of the dead eyes of children And their rivers of blood turned to ice.
Stay near me—do not take thy flight! A little longer stay in sight! Much converse do I find in Thee, Historian of my Infancy! Float near me; do not yet depart! Dead times revive in thee: Thou bring'st, gay Creature as thou art! A solemn image to my heart, My Father's Family!
Oh! pleasant, pleasant were the days, The time, when in our childish plays My sister Emmeline and I Together chased the Butterfly! A very hunter did I rush Upon the prey:—with leaps and springs I follow'd on from brake to bush; But She, God love her! feared to brush The dust from off its 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.