Down in yon summer vale, Where the rill flows. Thus said a Nightingale To his loved Rose:— "Tho' rich the pleasures "Of song's sweet measures, "Vain were its melody, "Rose, without thee."
Then from the green recess Of her night-bower, Beaming with bashfulness, Spoke the bright flower:— "Tho' morn should lend her "Its sunniest splendor, "What would the Rose be, "Unsung by thee?"
Thus still let Song attend Woman's bright way; Thus still let woman lend Light to the lay. Like stars thro' heaven's sea Floating in harmony Beauty should glide along Circled by Song.
The dam Bellona littered her eyeless offspring Kreigsopfer upon the pavements of Vienna
Sparkling precipitate the spectral day involves the visionless obstacle
this slow blind face pushing its virginal nonentity against the light
Pure purposeless eremite of centripetal sentience Upon the carnose horologe of the ego the vibrant tendon index moves not
since the black lightning desecrated the retinal altar
Void and extinct this planet of the soul strains from the craving throat in static flight upslanting
A downy youth's snout nozzling the sun drowned in dumbfounded instinct
Listen! illuminati of the coloured earth How this expressionless "thing" blows out damnation and concussive dark Upon a mouth-organ
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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.