And art thou he, now "fall'n on evil days," And changed indeed! Yet what do this sunk cheek, These thinner locks, and that calm forehead speak! A spirit reckless of man's blame or praise, — A spirit, when thine eyes to the noon's blaze Their dark orbs roll in vain, in suffering meek, As in the sight of God intent to seek, 'Mid solitude or age, or through the ways Of hard adversity, the approving look Of its great Master; whilst the conscious pride Of wisdom, patient and content to brook All ills to that sole Master's task applied, Shall show before high heaven the unaltered mind, Milton, though thou art poor, and old, and blind!
Chains may subdue the feeble spirit, but thee, Tell, of the iron heart! they could not tame! For thou wert of the mountains; they proclaim The everlasting creed of liberty. That creed is written on the untrampled snow, Thundered by torrents which no power can hold, Save that of God, when he sends forth his cold, And breathed by winds that through the free heaven blow. Thou, while thy prison walls were dark around, Didst meditate the lesson Nature taught, And to thy brief captivity was brought A vision of thy Switzerland unbound. The bitter cup they mingled, strengthened thee For the great work to set thy country free.
—
—
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.