Poem fractal
0.023 apart. A smaller distance means the lines are built more alike.
This number is read from the build of the lines. The bright edge is that number, carried outward until the pattern repeats.
−0.3761 − 0.4393i
Drawing the boundary…
−0.3591 − 0.4232i
Drawing the boundary…
Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.
Why bid my trembling lips explain
The faithful love in which I pine?
Oh! ask not words, for words were vain,
But read my eyes when fixt on thine.
Yet should this timid, conscious eye,
Bent on the earth, refuse to speak,—
Then, Henry, mark when thou art nigh
The tell-tale blush that paints my cheek.
To live in vain! to live in pain!
To toil in hopeless sadness!
Is this the doom of godlike man,
Oh, God of Love and Gladness?
Not so the rose in summer blows,
Not so the moon her changes knows,
Not so the storm his madness.
From storms that rock the oak to sleep,
Thy woods their beauty borrow;
And flowers, to-day, unheeded weep,
Whose seeds will live to-morrow:
So man, by painful ages taught,
Will build, at last, on truthful thought,
And wisdom, won from sorrow.
Else, what a lie were written wide,
By thy right hand, my Father,
O'er all thy seas, in crimson dyed
When Morning is a bather;
O'er all thy vales of growing gold;
Or where, on mountains black with cold,
Thy clouds to battle gather.
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.
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.
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.
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