Here has my salient faith annealed me. Out of the valley, past the ample crib To skies impartial, that do not disown me Nor claim me, either, by Adam's spine—nor rib.
The oar plash, and the meteorite's white arch Concur with wrist and bicep. In the moon That now has sunk I strike a single march To heaven or hades—to an equally frugal noon.
Because these millions reap a dead conclusion Need I presume the same fruit of my bone As draws them towards a doubly mocked confusion Of apish nightmares into steel-strung stone?
O, steel and stone! But gold was, scarcity before. And here is water, and a little wind…. There is no breath of friends and no more shore Where gold has not been sold and conscience tinned.
What dost thou here, thou shining, sinless thing, With many colored hues and shapely wing? Why quit the open field and summer air To flutter here? Thou hast no need of prayer.
'Tis meet that we, who this great structure built, Should come to be redeemed and washed from guilt, For we this gilded edifice within Are come, with erring hearts and stains of sin.
But thou art free from guilt as God on high; Go, seek the blooming waste and open sky, And leave us here our secret woes to bear, Confessionals and agonies of prayer.
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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.