How came this Japanese poppy To bloom alone, far afield in a middle meadow, With grasses and yellow buttercups around it, Lifting its scarlet splendor, bright as a flame, Like a ruddy moon, like a torch in the earthbound hands Of buried Persephone, high over flowering weeds?— A wind blew the seed from a lovely garden, Over the soft warm waters at night, when the stars Fringed down or lifted lashes of drowsy light For the soothing heat of September. But whence were you, Teresa Pashkowsky, Here amid drug stores, movies, squabble and alleys, Rising to song, and the soul of Lucia, Thais, And fame in the world?
God give us men; a time like this demands Strong minds, great hearts, true faith and ready hands. Men whom the lust of office cannot kill; Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy; Men who possess opinions and a will; Men who have honor; men who will not lie; Men who can stand before a demagogue, And brave his treacherous flatteries without winking; Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the fog, In public duty and in private thinking; For while the rabble, with its thumb-worn creeds, Its large professions, and its little deeds, Mingle in selfish strife—lo! Freedom weeps, Wrong rules the land, and waiting Justice sleeps.
—
—
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.