No more my Visionary Soul shall dwell On Joys that were! No more endure to weigh The Shame and Anguish of the evil Day, Wisely forgetful! O'er the Ocean swell Sublime of Hope I seek the cottag'd Dell, Where Virtue calm with careless step may stray, And dancing to the moonlight Roundelay The Wizard Passions weave an holy Spell. Eyes that have ach'd with Sorrow! Ye shall weep Tears of doubt-mingled Joy, like theirs who start From Precipices of distemper'd Sleep, On which the fierce-eyed Fiends their Revels keep, And see the rising Sun, & feel it dart New Rays of Pleasance trembling to the Heart.
The garden, like a day-dream, now invites me To share its sunny hours; Till one by one my thoughts, unwittingly, Wing forth from the blood's edge; More free than birds they pass, Bird-like, beyond the flowers To step on grass which smoothly meets the hedge. They have become a part of the coloured earth; And yet the eyes which see no longer see Flower, or grass, or tree: The world is shrunk into a little garth And life to phantasy. A petal falls; a wind shoulders the bough; A chattering bird beyond the garden flies? Is it the selfsame day? I would avow The grass is greener now; More blue the skies: With this awakening what dream-world dies?
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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.