Death found strange beauty on that polished brow And dashed it out.— There was a tint of rose On cheek and lip.— He touched the veins with ice, And the rose faded.— Forth from those blue eyes There spake a wishful tenderness, a doubt Whether to grieve or sleep, which innocence Alone may wear.— With ruthless haste he bound The silken fringes of those curtaining lids Forever.— There had been a murmuring sound, With which the babe would claim its mother's ear, Charming her even to tears.— The Spoiler set His seal of silence.— But there beamed a smile So fixed, so holy, from that cherub brow, Death gazed—and left it there .— He dared not steal The signet-ring of Heaven.
The Spring comes in with all her hues and smells, In freshness breathing over hills and dells; O’er woods where May her gorgeous drapery flings, And meads washed fragrant by their laughing springs. Fresh are new opened flowers, untouched and free From the bold rifling of the amorous bee. The happy time of singing birds is come, And Love’s lone pilgrimage now finds a home; Among the mossy oaks now coos the dove, And the hoarse crow finds softer notes for love. The foxes play around their dens, and bark In joy’s excess, ’mid woodland shadows dark. The flowers join lips below; the leaves above; And every sound that meets the ear is Love.
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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.