O'Leary was a poet—for a while: He sang of many ladies frail and fair, The rolling glory of their golden hair, And emperors extinguished with a smile. They foiled his years with many an ancient wile, And if they limped, O'Leary didn't care: He turned them loose and had them everywhere, Undoing saints and senates with their guile.
But this was not the end. A year ago I met him—and to meet was to admire: Forgotten were the ladies and the lyre, And the small, ink-fed Eros of his dream. By questioning I found a man to know— A failure spared, a Shadrach of the Gleam.
Ay, smile as you will, with your saintly face! But I know the line Of your guard is as weak as a maze of lace: You may give no sign— And the devil is never far to seek, And a rotten peach has a lovely cheek.
As they come in the stream, I say to you: The lives we jostle are none of them true. Who seeks with a lamp and glass may find A nature of honor from core to rind; But woe to the heart that is formed so true: It may not reck, and it still must rue The perjured lip and the bleeding vow. God keep it blind to the things we know— To the ghastly scars for the leech’s eyes And the occult lore of the worldly wise.
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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.