What are these things thou lovest? Vanity. To see men turn their heads when thou dost pass; To be the signboard and the looking-glass Where every idler there may glut his eye; To hear men speak thy name mysteriously, Wagging their heads. Is it for this, alas, That thou hast made a placard of a face On which the tears of love were hardly dry? What are these things thou lovest? The applause Of prostitutes at wit which is not thine; The sympathy of shop-boys who would weep Their shilling’s worth of woe in any cause, At any tragedy.—Their tears and mine, What difference? Oh truly tears are cheap!
When I consider Life and its few years— A wisp of fog betwixt us and the sun; A call to battle, and the battle done Ere the last echo dies within our ears; A rose choked in the grass; an hour of fears; The gusts that past a darkening shore do beat; The burst of music down an unlistening street — I wonder at the idleness of tears. Ye old, old dead, and ye of yesternight, Chieftains, and bards, and keepers of the sheep, By every cup of sorrow that you had, Loose me from tears, and make me see aright How each hath back what once he stayed to weep; Homer his sight, David his little lad!
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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.