O welcome bonny Month of may I love thy charms to view! Now birds I hear on ev'ry spray, And I hear Donald too, Thou art the month that brings The Swain who comes my hand to woo— I see thy verdure deck the plain, And I see Donald too.
Yet bonny, bonny month of May, My heart's so fond, and true, If Donald's absent, well-a-day! No charms in thee I view. But if he's here, when winter's snows The frozen earth bestrew, I smile to hear each wind that blows, For I hear Donald too.
Above yon sombre swell of land Thou see'st the dawn's grave orange hue, With one pale streak like yellow sand, And over that a vein of blue.
The air is cold above the woods; All silent is the earth and sky, Except with his own lonely moods The blackbird holds a colloquy.
Over the broad hill creeps a beam, Like hope that gilds a good man's brow; And now ascends the nostril-stream Of stalwart horses come to plough.
Ye rigid Ploughmen, bear in mind Your labour is for future hours: Advance—spare not—nor look behind— Plough deep and straight with all your powers!
—
—
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.