When the hamlet hailed a birth Judy used to cry: When she heard our christening mirth She would kneel and sigh. She was crazed, we knew, and we Humoured her infirmity.
When the daughters and the sons Gathered them to wed, And we like-intending ones Danced till dawn was red, She would rock and mutter, "More Comers to this stony shore!"
When old Headsman Death laid hands On a babe or twain, She would feast, and by her brands Sing her songs again. What she liked we let her do, Judy was insane, we knew.
The wind begun to rock the grass With threatening tunes and low, — He flung a menace at the earth, A menace at the sky.
The leaves unhooked themselves from trees And started all abroad; The dust did scoop itself like hands And throw away the road.
The wagons quickened on the streets, The thunder hurried slow; The lightning showed a yellow beak, And then a livid claw.
The birds put up the bars to nests, The cattle fled to barns; There came one drop of giant rain, And then, as if the hands
That held the dams had parted hold, The waters wrecked the sky, But overlooked my father's house, Just quartering a tree.
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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.