Sun Song
Sun and softness,
Sun and the beaten hardness of the earth,
Sun and the song of all the sun-stars
Gathered together—
Dark ones of Africa,
I bring you my songs
To sing on the Georgia roads.
Poem fractal
0.053 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.
Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.
Sun and softness,
Sun and the beaten hardness of the earth,
Sun and the song of all the sun-stars
Gathered together—
Dark ones of Africa,
I bring you my songs
To sing on the Georgia roads.
Fate met me as a cottage-girl,
Her hair hung in one long black curl,
On shoulders dimpled, bare, and kissed
By morning suns: the evening mist
Gloomed in her eyes to amethyst.
Her lips were red as strawberries,
Bare feet and brown sowed jealousies
Among the grasses that would fain
Unto a kiss of them attain —
And having kissed would kiss again.
Eyes dark as death and soft as sleep
Over her lips close watch did keep,
Forbidding and alluring both;
Till I that met them was not loth
In them to drown myself and troth.
From the dark cottage came the girl
As from the rough shell slips the pearl,
And passed me light as wind goes by,
That has not strength enough to dry
The dew that shines on roses nigh.
She passed me, making no delay,
Into the quiet churchyard-hay.
Her body fair in russet clad,
Her hair the only black she had;
Jenifer trysting with her lad.
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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