Like a loose island on the wide expanse, Unconscious floating on the fickle sea, Herself her all, she lives in privacy; Her waking life as lonely as a trance, Doom’d to behold the universal dance, And never hear the music which expounds The solemn step, coy slide, the merry bounds. The vague, mute language of the countenance. In vain for her I smooth my antic rhyme; She cannot hear it. All her little being Concentrated in her solitary seeing— What can she know of beauty or sublime? And yet methinks she looks so calm and good, God must be with her in her solitude!
Seraphic virgins of the tuneful choir, Assist me to prepare the sounding lyre. Like her I sing, soft, sensible, and fair, Let the smooth numbers warble in the air. Ye prudes, coquettes, and all the misled throng, Can beauty, virtue, sense, demand the song? Look then on Clarke, and see them all unite : A beauteous pattern to the always-right. Rest here, my muse, nor soar above thy sphere— Kings might pay adoration to the fair, Enchanting, full of joy, peerless in face and air.
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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.