When the wind storms by with a shout, and the stern sea-caves Rejoice in the tramp and the roar of onsetting waves, Then, then, it comes home to the heart that the top of life Is the passion that burns the blood in the act of strife— Till you pity the dead down there in their quiet graves.
But to drowse with the fen behind and the fog before, When the rain-rot spreads, and a tame sea mumbles the shore, Not to adventure, none to fight, no right and no wrong, Sons of the Sword heart-sick for a stave of your sire's old song— O, you envy the blessèd dead that can live no more!
Walking in gardens by the sides Of marble bathers toeing the garden ponds, Skirting the ordered beds of paint-box flowers, We spoke of drink and girls, for hours Touched on the outskirts of the mind, Then stirred a little chaos in the sun. A new divinity, a god of wheels Destroying souls and laying waste, Trampling to dust the bits and pieces Of faulty men and their diseases, Rose in our outworn brains. We spoke our lines, Made, for the bathers to admire, Dramatic gestures in the air. Ruin and revolution Whirled in our words, then faded. We might have tried light matches in the wind. Over and round the ordered garden hummed, There was no need of a new divinity, No tidy flower moved, no bather gracefully Lifted her marble foot, or lowered her hand To brush upon the waters of the pond.
—
—
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.