Because you never yet have loved me, dear, Think you you never can nor ever will? Surely while life remains hope lingers still, Hope the last blossom of life's dying year. Because the season and mine age grow sere, Shall never Spring bring forth her daffodil, Shall never sweeter Summer feast her fill Of roses with the nightingales they hear? If you had loved me, I not loving you, If you had urged me with the tender plea Of what our unknown years to come might do (Eternal years, if Time should count too few), I would have owned the point you pressed on me, Was possible, or probable, or true.
The past and present wilt—I have fill'd them, emptied them. And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
Listener up there! what have you to confide to me? Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening, (Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.
Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through with his supper? Who wishes to walk with me?
Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?
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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.