All the way to age we'll go Hand in hand together; All the way to brows of snow Through every sort of weather. Rain or shine, blue sky or gray, Joy and sorrow sharing Hand in hand along the way We'll go bravely faring.
All the way to sunset land We'll walk down together Side by side and hand in hand Held by Cupid's tether. Once we danced in early May Steps we'll long remember; So we'll trip the miles away Even to December.
Let the years go fleeting by! Gray old age shall find us Still recalling smile and sigh Long since left behind us. And though feeble we may grow, Worn by wind and weather, All the way to Age we'll go Hand in hand together.
We watch'd her breathing through the night, Her breathing soft and low, As in her breast the wave of life Kept heaving to and fro.
So silently we seem'd to speak, So slowly moved about, As we had lent her half our powers To eke her living out.
Our very hopes belied our fears, Our fears our hopes belied— We thought her dying when she slept, And sleeping when she died.
For when the morn came dim and sad, And chill with early showers, Her quiet eyelids closed—she had Another morn than ours.
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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.