Poem fractal
0.043 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 Hart Crane
0.0669 − 1.0580i
Drawing the boundary…
0.0312 − 1.0332i
Drawing the boundary…
Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.
by Hart Crane
No more violets,
And the year
Broken into smoky panels.
What woods remember now
Her calls, her enthusiasms.
That ritual of sap and leaves
The sun drew out,
Ends in this latter muffled
Bronze and brass. The wind
Takes rein.
If, dusty, I bear
An image beyond this
Already fallen harvest,
I can only query, "Fool—
Have you remembered too long;
Or was there too little said
For ease or resolution—
Summer scarcely begun
And violets,
A few picked, the rest dead?"
In childhood any toy
For one short hour amuses;
And all its store of joy
With its new lustre loses.
The boy keeps up the game
Just as the child began it;
For boyhood's joyous flame
Needs novelty to fan it.
The youth, when beauty's eye
First wakes the pulse of pleasure,
Thinks with a fruitless sigh
That he has found his treasure.
Existence further scan
In all succeeding stages,
View it in ripen'd man,
In hoary-headed sages—
What pleasure can it give
Unless it stoop to borrow,
And lead us on to live
On bliss to be-to-morrow?
What can this world bestow
That should enchain us to it?
Or compensate the woe
We bear who journey through it?
O man! if to this earth
Thy heart is wedded only,
Each hope that comes with mirth
Will leave thee twice as lonely:
And when that hope is gone
Thou shalt be all forsaken,
For having leant upon
A reed by each wind shaken.
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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