Emmeline Has not been seen For more than a week. She slipped between The two tall trees at the end of the green . . . We all went after her. "Emmeline!"
"Emmeline, I didn't mean— I only said that your hands weren't clean." We went to the trees at the end of the green . . . But Emmeline Was not to be seen.
Emmeline Came slipping between The two tall trees at the end of the green. We all ran up to her. "Emmeline! Where have you been? Where have you been? Why, it's more than a week!" And Emmeline Said, "Sillies, I went and saw the Queen. She says my hands are purfickly clean!"
Girl of fifteen, I see you each morning from my window As you pass on your way to school. I do more than see, I watch you. I furtively draw the curtain aside. And my heart leaps through my eyes And follows you down the street; Leaving me behind, half-hid And wholly ashamed.
What holds me back, Half-hid behind the curtains and wholly ashamed, But my forty years beyond your fifteen?
Girl of fifteen, as you pass There passes, too, a lightning flash of time In which you lift those forty summers off my head, And take those forty winters out of my heart.
—
—
0:00
0:00
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.