They die—the dead return not—Misery Sits near an open grave and calls them over, A Youth with hoary hair and haggard eye— They are the names of kindred, friend and lover, Which he so feebly calls—they all are gone— Fond wretch, all dead! those vacant names alone, This most familiar scene, my pain— These tombs—alone remain.
Misery, my sweetest friend—oh, weep no more! Thou wilt not be consoled—I wonder not! For I have seen thee from thy dwelling’s door Watch the calm sunset with them, and this spot Was even as bright and calm, but transitory, And now thy hopes are gone, thy hair is hoary; This most familiar scene, my pain— These tombs—alone remain.
The ocean tosses patterns at my feet — Large, irresistible, minute and lost. A busy rabbit-headed grasshopper Carves a green blade down to the yellow spine. Over the mounded sand hot-foots an ant. A ghostly spider pauses in the sun. Across the sea those armies, that small chaos Of rabbit-headed hot-foot ghostly men Are ocean-patterns brought me by the surf, Large, irresistible, minute and lost.
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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.