Could I but harmonise one kindly thought, Fix one fair image in a snatch of song, Which maids might warble as they tripped along; Or could I ease the labouring heart, o’erfraught With passionate truths for which the mind untaught Lacks form or utterance, with a single line; Might rustic lovers woo in phrase of mine, I should not deem that I have lived for nought; The world were welcome to forget my name, Could I bequeath a few remembered words Like his, the bard who never dreamed of fame, Whose rhymes preserve from harm the pious birds; Or his, that dim full many a star-bright eye With woe for Barbara Allen’s cruelty.
Where art thou friend, whom I shall never see, Conceiving whom I must conceive amiss? Or sunder'd from my sight in the age that is Or far-off promise of a time to be; Thou who canst best accept the certainty That thou hadst borne proportion in my bliss, That likest in me either that or this,— Oh! even for the weakness of the plea That I have taken to plead with,—if the sound Of God's dear pleadings have as yet not moved thee,— And for those virtues I in thee have found, Who say that had I known I had approved thee,— For these, make all the virtues to abound,— No, but for Christ who hath foreknown and loved thee.
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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.