Moonmoth and grasshopper that flee our page And still wing on, untarnished of the name We pinion to your bodies to assuage Our envy of your freedom—we must maim
Because we are usurpers, and chagrined— And take the wing and scar it in the hand. Names we have, even, to clap on the wind; But we must die, as you, to understand.
I dreamed that all men dropped their names, and sang As only they can praise, who build their days With fin and hoof, with wing and sweetened fang Struck free and holy in one Name always.
If I went past you down this hill And you had never seen my face before, Would all your being feel the sudden thrill You said it felt, once more?
If I went past you through this shaw, Would be all a-quiver at the brush Of my trailed garments; would the sudden hush You said the black-birds' voices had in awe Of my first coming, fall upon the place Once more, if you had never seen my face Nor ever heard my passing by before, And nought had passed of all that was of yore?
—
—
0:00
0:00
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.