Ere elfish Night shall sift another day Hope-broken 'neath her ebon scepter's keep, Or the fainting soul's last flames all trembling creep White-taper-like, and paler, pulse away, Then shalt thou come, O Saint, in magic sway Of midnight's purple organ-breath, and sweep Brave echoes from the spooming coast to steep, Blue heights where cone-wood calls near summits spray Frost-fringes through thine octaves…. And from shades Of moon-fled valleys, there shall rise a rift, The supplication of all earth, mute serenades, Whispering, "Cecilia, Saint, leave us thy gift." And sleep shalt thou bestow, the final song, And Time shall set the morning stars adrift.
When I perceive how slight and poor appears (Though with sad care and strong compulsion brought Down rangèd rhymes with strenuous search of thought) The express'd result of my most passionate years; Remembering, too, from what divinest spheres Stoop'd many a starry visitant, and taught My spirit at her toils,—how round her wrought Strong Raptures, Sorrows, Splendours rich in tears, My whole heart fails me. Then an inward voice Replies, "Possess thyself, and be content. Life's best is bound not by the utterance Of any word, nor may in sound be spent, To win back echoes out of hollow chance. What thou hast felt is thine. If much, rejoice."
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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.