Nymph of the downward smile and sidelong glance, In what diviner moments of the day Art thou most lovely? — when gone far astray Into the labyrinths of sweet utterance, Or when serenely wand'ring in a trance Of sober thought? — or when starting away With careless robe to meet the morning ray Thou spar'st the flowers in thy mazy dance? Haply 'tis when thy ruby lips part sweetly, And so remain, because thou listenest: But thou to please wert nurtured so completely That I can never tell what mood is best. I shall as soon pronounce which Grace more neatly Trips it before Apollo than the rest.
Lord of the deserts 'twixt a million spheres, Child of the moon-dawn and the naked moon, Close comrade of the whispered afternoon, Angel of mercy, whose absolving tears Erase the discord of our human fears: Thy lap is freighted with the dawn, thy heart Is warm about the sunset, for thou art The woof and fabric of eternal years. Thy hand is soft upon the troubled eyes, And, in the palace of thy sister Sleep, Thy peace remains when Life's last echo dies. Thou art more tender than the raptured breath That rounds a virgin's breast, and thou dost keep Thy kiss to lay upon the brows of Death.
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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.