Among the flowers, like flowers, her slow hands move Easing a muffled bell or stooping low To help sweet roses climb the stakes above, Where pansies stare and seem to whisper 'Lo!' Like gaudy butterflies her sweet peas blow Filling the garden with dim rustlings. Clear On the sweet Book she reads how long ago There was a garden to a woman dear.
She makes her life one grand beatitude Of Love and Peace, and with contented eyes She sees not in the whole world mean or rude, And her small lot she trebly multiplies. And when the darkness muffles up the skies Still to be happy is her sole desire, She sings sweet songs about a great emprise, And sees a garden blowing in the fire.
For warmth alone, for shelter only From the cold anger of the eyeless wind, That knows my whereabouts, and mainly To be at your door when I go down Is abroad at all tonight in town, I left my phrase in air, and sinned, Laying my head against your arm A moment, and as suddenly Withdrawing it, and sitting there, Warmed a little but far from warm, And the wind still waiting at the foot of the stair, And much harm done, and the phrase in air.
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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.