I saw a boy with eager eye Open a book upon a stall, And read as he’d devour it all; Which when the stall-man did espy, Soon to the boy I heard him call, ‘You, Sir, you never buy a book, Therefore in one you shall not look.’ The boy passed slowly on, and with a sigh He wished he never had been taught to read, Then of the old churl’s books he should have had no need.
Of sufferings the poor have many, Which never can the rich annoy. I soon perceived another boy Who looked as if he’d not had any Food for that day at least, enjoy The sight of cold meat in a tavern larder. This boy’s case, thought I, is surely harder, Thus hungry longing, thus without a penny, Beholding choice of dainty dressed meat; No wonder if he wish he ne’er had learned to eat.
Mine eyes, of old the beamiest of the beamy, Are now, alas! the filmiest of the filmy; So meagre am I, too, no lath is like me; Death for my shadowy thinness cannot see me, And when he enters my sad cell to kill me, His lance will not know how or where to strike me!
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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.