My Troubles
I wrote down my troubles every day;
And after a few short years,
When I turned to the heart-aches passed away,
I read them with smiles, not tears.
Poem fractal
0.033 apart. A smaller distance means the lines are built more alike.
This number is read from the build of the lines. The bright edge is that number, carried outward until the pattern repeats.
0.3205 − 0.3721i
Drawing the boundary…
0.2920 − 0.3557i
Drawing the boundary…
Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.
I wrote down my troubles every day;
And after a few short years,
When I turned to the heart-aches passed away,
I read them with smiles, not tears.
Spectres came dancing up the wind,
Trailing down the long grass,
Shooting high, undisciplined,
To join the sun and see you pass…
The colors of the pointed glass.
Under a willow-maze you went
Unsaddened…But a violet beam
Fell on the white face, backward bent,
Of a body in a stream.
Into the sun you came again,
With sun-red light your feet were shod…
And round you stood a ring of feathered men
With naked arms acknowledging a god.
Indigo-birds and squirrels on a tree
And orioles flashed in and out…
The yellow outline of Eurydice
Waited for Orpheus in a black redoubt
With a beaded fern you waved away a gnat…
And maidens, hung with vivid beads of green,
One of them bearing in her arms an orange cat,
Held palms about a queen.
Then you were lost to sight
And locking trees became the clouds of you,
Till you emerged, the moon upon your shoulder, and the night
Bloomed blue.
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.
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.
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.
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