When Susan's work was done, she'd sit With one fat guttering candle lit, And window opened wide to win The sweet night air to enter in; There, with a thumb to keep her place She'd read, with stern and wrinkled face. Her mild eyes gliding very slow Across the letters to and fro, While wagged the guttering candle flame In the wind that through the window came. And sometimes in the silence she Would mumble a sentence audibly, Or shake her head as if to say, 'You silly souls, to act this way!' And never a sound from night I'd hear, Unless some far-off cock crowed clear; Or her old shuffling thumb should turn Another page; and rapt and stern, Through her great glasses bent on me She'd glance into reality; And shake her round old silvery head, With—'You!—I thought you was in bed!'— Only to tilt her book again, And rooted in Romance remain.
Walking in gardens by the sides Of marble bathers toeing the garden ponds, Skirting the ordered beds of paint-box flowers, We spoke of drink and girls, for hours Touched on the outskirts of the mind, Then stirred a little chaos in the sun. A new divinity, a god of wheels Destroying souls and laying waste, Trampling to dust the bits and pieces Of faulty men and their diseases, Rose in our outworn brains. We spoke our lines, Made, for the bathers to admire, Dramatic gestures in the air. Ruin and revolution Whirled in our words, then faded. We might have tried light matches in the wind. Over and round the ordered garden hummed, There was no need of a new divinity, No tidy flower moved, no bather gracefully Lifted her marble foot, or lowered her hand To brush upon the waters of the pond.
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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.