'Don't cry, don't cry for the moon!' Her restive heart would croon; Her restive heart of delights and fears, Of laughter tangled amid her tears, 'Don't cry for the moon!'
For she wanted the moon herself; wanted The shimmering moon of wealth and love, The moon of rank and fame that haunted The heavens above her. She wanted the moon, and so would sing To any, with odd caprice, 'Don't cry! Don't cry for the moon!'—betraying Her own appeaseless sigh.
'Don't cry, don't cry for the moon!' It broke her peace at last. It broke her mind and it broke her heart, And she died in a place that is set apart For the moon-criers—who do not know That the moon's for none—only its glow; Only its even radiance, cast On all, with aimless art.
We've trod the maze of error round, Long wandering in the winding glade; And now the torch of truth is found, It only shows us where we strayed: By long experience taught, we know? Can rightly judge of friends and foes; Can all the worth of these allow, And all the faults discern in those.
Now, 'tis our boast that we can quell The wildest passions in their rage, Can their destructive force repel, And their impetuous wrath assuage? Ah, Virtue! dost thou arm when now This bold rebellious race are fled? When all these tyrants rest, and thou Art warring with the mighty dead?
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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.