Of the old house, only a few crumbled Courses of brick, smothered in nettle and dock, Or a squared stone, lying mossy where it tumbled! Sprawling bramble and saucy thistle mock What once was firelit floor and private charm Where, seen in a windowed picture, hills were fading At dusk, and all was memory-coloured and warm, And voices talked, secure from the wind's invading.
Of the old garden, only a stray shining Of daffodil flames amid April's cuckoo-flowers, Or a cluster of aconite mixt with weeds entwining! But, dark and lofty, a royal cedar towers By homely thorns: whether the white rain drifts Or sun scorches, he holds the downs in ken, The western vale; his branchy tiers he lifts, Older than many a generation of men.
My heart shall be thy garden. Come, my own, Into thy garden. Thine be happy hours Among my fairest fruits, my tallest flowers, From root to crowning petal thine alone. Thine is the place from where the seeds are sown, Up to the sky enclosed, with all its showers. But ah, the birds, the birds! Who shall build bowers To keep these thine? O friend, the birds have flown.
For as these come and go, and quit our pine To follow the sweet season, or, new-comers, Sing one song only from our alder trees, My heart has thoughts, which, though thine eyes hold mine, Flit to the silent world and other summers With wings that dip beyond the silver seas.
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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.