In midst of all, there lay a sleeping youth Of fondest beauty. Sideway his face reposed On one white arm, and tenderly unclosed, By tenderest pressure, a faint damask mouth To slumbery pout; just as the morning south Disparts a dew-lipp'd rose. Above his head, Four lily stalks did their white honours wed To make a coronal; and round him grew All tendrils green, of every bloom and hue, Together intertwined and trammel'd fresh: The vine of glossy sprout; the ivy mesh, Shading its Ethiop berries; and woodbine, Of velvet leaves, and bugle blooms divine. Hard by, Stood serene Cupids watching silently. One, kneeling to a lyre, touch'd the strings, Muffling to death the pathos with his wings; And, ever and anon, uprose to look At the youth's slumber; while another took A willow bough, distilling odorous dew, And shook it on his hair; another flew In through the woven roof, and fluttering-wise, Rain'd violets upon his sleeping eyes.
Yee Bow was killed by the son of Rev. Wiley; And they wound his pigtail around his head, And buried him near Chase Henry. No laundry for me, But the Golden Pheasant, Where I served steak as well as chop suey. And I wore their clothes and cut my queue, And read the magazines and the dailies, No longer a Chinese heathen. But did I forget my City of Flowers? No! For I lighted my pipe and dreamed: And the waterspouts on Bindle's Block Were twisted dolphins on temple roofs; The ash barrels in the alley became Buddhas in bronze by an ivied wall; The water tower seemed like a pagoda At Ta-Li Fu, and the lilac bushes Spread into courtyards full of blossoms. Ding! went the register, boom went the drum, As the Salvation Army passed and shouted The blood of the Lamb…but I heard the bells And gongs of Buddha, on high, far away, Where a poppy moon hangs over the hills As yellow as moth wings, under a sky As white as the shrines or the glistening streams In the Valley of Fragrant Springs!
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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.