The moist and quiet moon was scarcely breaking, When Ariadne in her bower was waking; Her eyelids still were closing, and she heard But indistinctly yet a little bird. That in the leaves o'erhead, waiting the sun, Seemed answering another distant one. She waked but stirred not, only just to please Her pillow-nestling cheek; while the full seas, The birds, the leaves, the lulling love o'ernight, The happy thought of the returning light, The sweet, self-willed content, conspired to keep Her senses lingering in the feel of sleep; And with a little smile she seemed to say, "I know my love is near me, and 'tis day."
It keeps eternal whisperings around Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell Gluts twice ten thousand Caverns, till the spell Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound. Often 'tis in such gentle temper found, That scarcely will the very smallest shell Be mov'd for days from where it sometime fell, When last the winds of Heaven were unbound. Oh ye! who have your eye-balls vex'd and tir'd, Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea; Oh ye! whose ears are dinn'd with uproar rude, Or fed too much with cloying melody— Sit ye near some old Cavern's Mouth, and brood Until ye start, as if the sea-nymphs quir'd!
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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.