Poem fractal
0.026 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.
−0.4466 − 0.6336i
Drawing the boundary…
−0.4265 − 0.6496i
Drawing the boundary…
Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.
We walked together in the dusk
To watch the tower grow dimly white,
And saw it lift against the sky
Its flower of amber light.
You talked of half a hundred things,
I kept each hurried word you said;
And when at last the hour was full,
I saw the light turn red.
You did not know the time had come,
You did not see the sudden flower,
Nor know that in my heart Love's birth
Was reckoned from that hour.
The Faun piped in the coppice,
He piped a plaintive strain;
I called on him to stop his
"Sweet Summer, come again!"
Said he, "I pine for posies,
For June in wood and wold;
The nymphs have got red noses
And all the world’s a-cold!"
"Come, ring a ring of roses,"
Quoth I, "my bonnie lad;
Though nymphs have got red noses
There’s balm in Gilead;
Though frosty breezes rack us
Through forests all forlorn,
I know a nook where Bacchus
Fills high the jolly horn.
"Come, though the rude North bellows,
I know a rosy inn
Where certain sound good fellows
Sip sunshine from the bin,
True knights of malt and vine, Faun,
Who'll reck not of attire
In any friend of mine, Faun,
About the tap-room fire."
He came, he drained the rummer
Of friendship and accord;
He swore 'twas always summer
When Bacchus is the lord;
And, ring a ring of roses,
He didn’t care a jot
If nymphs had got red noses
Or whether they had not.
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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