Let me lean hard upon the Eternal Breast: In all earth's devious ways I sought for rest And found it not. I will be strong, said I, And lean upon myself. I will not cry And importune all heaven with my complaint. But now my strength fails, and I fall, I faint: Let me lean hard.
Let me lean hard upon the unfailing Arm. I said I will walk on, I fear no harm, The spark divine within my soul will show The upward pathway where my feet should go. But now the heights to which I most aspire Are lost in clouds. I stumble and I tire: Let me lean hard.
Let me lean harder yet. That swerveless force Which speeds the solar systems on their course Can take, unfelt, the burden of my woe, Which bears me to the dust and hurts me so. I thought my strength enough for any fate, But lo! I sink beneath my sorrow's weight: Let me lean hard.
Since we can die but once, what matters it, If rope or garter, poison, pistol, sword, Slow-wasting sickness, or the sudden burst Of valve arterial in the noble parts, Curtail the miseries of human life? Though varied is the cause, the effect’s the same: All to one common dissolution tends.
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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.