O friends! who have accompanied thus far My quickening steps, sometimes where sorrow sate Dejected, and sometimes where valour stood Resplendent, right before us; here perhaps We best might part; but one to valour dear Comes up in wrath and calls me worse than foe, Reminding me of gifts too ill deserved. I must not blow away the flowers he gave, Altho' now faded; I must not efface The letters his own hand has traced for me. Here terminates my park of poetry. Look out no longer for extensive woods, For clusters of unlopt and lofty trees, With stately animals coucht under them, Or grottoes with deep wells of water pure, And ancient figures in the solid rock: Come, with our sunny pasture be content, Our narrow garden and our homestead croft, And tillage not neglected. Love breathes round; Love, the bright atmosphere, the vital air, Of youth; without it life and death are one.
Together in this grave lie Benjamin Pantier, attorney at law, And Nig, his dog, constant companion, solace and friend. Down the gray road, friends, children, men and women, Passing one by one out of life, left me till I was alone With Nig for partner, bed-fellow, comrade in drink. In the morning of life I knew aspiration and saw glory. Then she, who survives me, snared my soul With a snare which bled me to death, Till I, once strong of will, lay broken, indifferent, Living with Nig in a room back of a dingy office. Under my jaw-bone is snuggled the bony nose of Nig — Our story is lost in silence. Go by, mad world!
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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.