When reeds are dead and a straw to thatch the marshes, And feathered pampas-grass rides into the wind Like agèd warriors westward, tragic, thinned Of half their tribe, and over the flattened rushes, Stripped of its secret, open, stark and bleak, Blackens afar the half-forgotten creek,— Then leans on me the weight of the year, and crushes My heart. I know that Beauty must ail and die, And will be born again,—but ah, to see Beauty stiffened, staring up at the sky! Oh, Autumn! Autumn!—What is the Spring to me?
It came to pass upon a summer’s day, When from the flowers indeed my soul had caught Fresh bloom, and turned their richness into thought, That—having made my footsteps free to stray— They brought me wandering by some sudden way Back to the bloomless city, and athwart The doleful streets and many a closed-up court That prisoned here and there a spent noon-ray. O how most bitterly upon me broke The sight of all the summerless lost folk!— For verily their music and their gladness Could only seem to me like so much sadness, Beside the inward rhapsody of art And flowers and Chopin-echoes at my heart.
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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.