When I shall be divorced, some ten years hence, From this poor present self which I am now; When youth has done its tedious vain expense Of passions that forever ebb and flow:
Shall I not joy youth’s heats are left behind, And breathe more happy in an even clime? Ah, no! for then I shall begin to find A thousand virtues in this hated time!
Then I shall wish its agitations back, And all its thwarting currents of desire; Then I shall praise the heat which then I lack, And call this hurrying fever, generous fire;
And sigh that one thing only has been lent To youth and age in common,—discontent.
Here lie the beasts of man and here I feast, The dead man said, And silently I milk the devil’s breast. Here spring the silent venoms of his blood, Here clings the meat to sever from his side. Hell’s in the dust.
Here lies the beast of man and here his angels, The dead man said, And silently I milk the buried flowers. Here drips a silent honey in my shroud, Here slips the ghost who made of my pale bed The heaven’s house.
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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.