Sole Positive of Night! Antipathist of Light! Fate’s only essence! primal scorpion rod— The one permitted opposite of God!— Condenséd blackness and abysmal storm Compacted to one scepter Arms the Grasp enorm— The Intercepter— The Substance that still casts the shadow Death! The Dragon foul and fell— The unrevealable, And hidden one, whose breath Gives wind and fuel to the fires of Hell! Ah! sole despair Of both th’ eternities in Heaven! Sole interdict of all-bedewing prayer, The all-compassionate! Save to the Lampads Seven Reveal’d to none of all th’ Angelic State, Save to the Lampads Seven, That watch the throne of Heaven!
As on my bed at dawn I mused and prayed, I saw my lattice prankt upon the wall, The flaunting leaves and flitting birds withal— A sunny phantom interlaced with shade; "Thanks be to Heaven," in happy mood I said, "What sweeter aid my matins could befall Than this fair glory from the east hath made? What holy sleights hath God, the Lord of all, To bid us feel and see! We are not free To say we see not, for the glory comes Nightly and daily, like the flowing sea; His lustre pierces through the midnight glooms, And at prime hours, behold! he follows me With golden shadows to my secret rooms."
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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.