Hence that fantastic wantonness of woe, O Youth to partial Fortune vainly dear! To plunder’d Want’s half-shelter’d hovel go, Go, and some hunger-bitten infant hear Moan haply in a dying mother’s ear: Or when the cold and dismal fog damps brood O’er the rank churchyard with sear elm leaves strew’d, Pace round some widow’s grave, whose dearer part Was slaughter’d, where o’er his uncoffin’d limbs The flocking flesh-birds scream’d! Then, while thy heart Groans, and thine eye a fiercer sorrow dims, Know (and the truth shall kindle thy young mind) What Nature makes thee mourn, she bids thee heal! O abject! if, to sickly dreams resign’d, All effortless thou leave Life’s commonweal A prey to Tyrants, Murderers of Mankind.
When the last sea is sailed and the last shallow charted, When the last field is reaped and the last harvest stored, When the last fire is out and the last guest departed, Grant the last prayer that I shall pray, Be good to me, O Lord!
And let me pass in a night at sea, a night of storm and thunder, In the loud crying of the wind through sail and rope and spar; Send me a ninth great peaceful wave to drown and roll me under To the cold tunny-fishes’ home where the drowned galleons are.
And in the dim green quiet place far out of sight and hearing, Grant I may hear at whiles the wash and thresh of the sea-foam About the fine keen bows of the stately clippers steering Towards the lone northern star and the fair ports of home.
—
—
0:00
0:00
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.