No one gives you a thought, as day by day You drag your feet, clay-thick with misery. None think how stalemate in you grinds away, Holding your spinning wheels an inch too high To bite on earth. The mind, it's said, is free But not your minds. They, rusted stiff, admit Only what will accuse or horrify, Like slot-machines only bent pennies fit.
So year by year your tense unfinished faces Sink further from the light. No one pretends To want to help you now. For interest passes Always towards the young and more insistent, And skirts locked rooms where a hired darkness ends Your long defence against the non-existent.
When he, who adores thee, has left but the name Of his fault and his sorrows behind, Oh! say wilt thou weep, when they darken the fame Of a life that for thee was resigned? Yes, weep, and however my foes may condemn, Thy tears shall efface their decree; For Heaven can witness, tho' guilty to them, I have been but too faithful to thee.
With thee were the dreams of my earliest love; Every thought of my reason was thine; In my last humble prayer to the Spirit above, Thy name shall be mingled with mine. Oh! blest are the lovers and friend who shall live The days of thy glory to see; But the next dearest blessing that Heaven can give Is the pride of thus dying for thee.
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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.