O, human Destiny! thou art a mystery, Which tasks the o'erwearied intellect in vain; O, World! thou art a cabalistic history, Whose lessons madden and destroy the brain. O, Life! whose page, a necromantic scroll, Is charactered with sentences of terror, Which, like the shapes on a magician's mirror, At once bewilder and appal the soul,
We blindly roam thy Labyrinth of Error, And clasp a phantom when we gain thy goal. Yet roll, thou troubled Flood of Time! Still bear Thy base wrecks to the whirlgulf of the Past, But Man and Heaven will bless thee if thou hast Spared for their final sphere the Noble and the Fair.
The storms that break and sweep about my feet, The winds that blow and tear, the rains that fall, Shall not the courage of my soul appall; I shall be conqueror, tho' sore defeat O'erwhelm the outbound keels of all my fleet Of dreams; tho' not one tattered sail, but all Go down mid sea; with heart serene, I'll greet The worst or best, the stronger for the squall.
My soul is set amid the storms of life,— The hurricanes of passion crash and break And tides of heathen hate sweep o'er our land; But calm amid the flying ruins of strife, Or in the leaping flames around the stake With pierced hands—my faith serene,—I stand!
—
—
0:00
0:00
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.