Poem fractal
0.010 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.
by Leigh Hunt
−0.0868 − 0.1310i
Drawing the boundary…
−0.0948 − 0.1366i
Drawing the boundary…
Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.
by Leigh Hunt
When the sports of youth I see,
Youth itself returns to me.
Then indeed my old age springs,
To the dance on starting wings.
Stop, Cybele, roses there, —
As befits a dancer's hair:
Grey-beard sloth away be flung;
And I'll join you, young for young,
Afterwards go fetch we wine,
Bounty of a fruit divine;
And I'll show what age can do,
Able still to warble too,
Able still to drink down sadness,
And display a graceful madness.
Ivy of Ireland in my garden grows
Beside the foxglove that the wild bee knows,
More dear to me than lavender or rose.
Gray moths about it flit, and gold wasps hum:
The bees salute it softly as they come:
The east wind loiters by it, and is dumb —
Or whispers very lightly of green rings,
And hollow raths, and fairy-peopled springs,
And buried days when Boholaun had wings:
And rode amid the unforgotten Shee.
Or the west wind comes, laughing, from the sea,
And tells the youngest leaves of days to be,
When Eri's grievous wound is healed, and she
Shall lift her gracious head, and, smiling, see
Her children coming crowned about her knee.
Ivy of Ireland, is the promise clear?
You climb towards the light 'twixt hope and fear.
But would to God the day we wait were here!
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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