The Sun, sweet girl, hath run his year-long race Through the vast nothing of the eternal sky— Since the glad hearing of the first faint cry Announc’d a stranger from the unknown place Of unborn souls. How blank was then the face, How uninform’d the weak light-shunning eye, That wept and saw not. Poor mortality Begins to mourn before it knows its case, Prophetic in its ignorance. But soon The hospitalities of earth engage The banish’d spirit in its new exile — Pass some few changes of the fickle Moon, The merry babe has learn’d its Mother’s smile, Its father’s frown, its nurse’s mimic rage.
Here would the aged pilgrim gladly stay To rest him in these hospitable halls; Here where the night disconsolately falls With song and story keep the night at bay. Here did the shadowy brethren, white and grey, Move to and fro within their stately walls, And bind and loose the burdens of their thralls Nor ever from the poor man turn away. Alas! within the Abbot's painted room, Rich with armorial rose and Eastern palms, The ferns are growing and the harebells bloom, And blackberry for all who ask an alms, Where, through the vale of nightshade in the gloom, The screech owl hoots his penitential psalms.
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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.