Poem fractal
0.041 apart. A smaller distance means the lines are built more alike.
This number is read from the build of the lines. The bright edge is that number, carried outward until the pattern repeats.
0.1250 − 0.0530i
Drawing the boundary…
0.1101 − 0.0913i
Drawing the boundary…
Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.
You, Helen, who see the stars
As mistletoe berries burning in a black tree,
You surely, seeing I am a bowl of kisses,
Should put your mouth to mine and drink of me.
Helen, you let my kisses steam
Wasteful into the night’s black nostrils; drink
Me up I pray; oh you who are Night’s Bacchante,
How can you from my bowl of kisses shrink!
Allas! my worthi maister honorable,
This landes verray tresor and richesse!
Deth by thy deth hath harme irreparable
Unto us done: hir vengeable duresse
Dispoiled hath this londe of the swetnesse
Of rethoryk; for unto Tullius
Was never man so like amonges us.
Also who was hier in philosophie
To Aristotle in our tonge but thou?
The steppes of Virgile in poesie
Thou folwedest eeke, men wot wel ynow.
That combre-world that thee my maister slow—
Wolde I slayne were!— Deth, was to hastyfe
To renne on thee and reve the thi lyfe…
She myght han taried hir vengeaunce a while
Til that som man had egal to the be;
Nay, lat be that! sche knew wel that this yle
May never man forth brynge like to the,
And hir office nedes do mot she:
God bade hir so, I truste as for the beste;
O maister, maister, God thy soule reste!
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.
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.
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.
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