O come and stand with me upon this ridge That overlooks the sweet secluded vale; Before us is a little rustic bridge, A simple plank; and by its side a rail, On either hand to guide the footsteps frail Of first and second childhood; while below, The murmuring brooklet tells its babbling tale, Like a sweet undersong, which in its flow It chanteth to the flowers that on its margin grow.
For many a flower does blossom there, to bless With beauty, and with fragrance to imbue The borders—strawberry of the wilderness, The starlike daisy, violet deeply blue, And cowslip, in whose cup the morning dew Glistens unspent till noontide's languid hour; And, last of all, and fairest to the view, The lily of the vale, whose virgin flower Trembles at every breeze within its leafy bower.
Only the chemist can tell, and not always the chemist, What will result from compounding Fluids or solids. And who can tell How men and women will interact On each other, or what children will result? There were Benjamin Pantier and his wife, Good in themselves, but evil toward each other: He oxygen, she hydrogen, Their son, a devastating fire. I Trainor, the druggist, a mixer of chemicals, Killed while making an experiment, Lived unwedded.
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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.