This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green, Wild puffing of green-fire trees, and flame-green bushes, Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between Where the wood fumes up, and the flickering, watery rushes.
I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration Of green fires lit on the soil of earth, this blaze Of growing, these smoke-puffs that puff in wild gyration, Faces of people blowing across my gaze!
And I, what sort of fire am I among This conflagration of spring? the gap in it all —! Not even palish smoke like the rest of the throng. Less than the wind that runs to the flamy call!
A gang of labourers on the piled wet timber That shines blood-red beside the railway siding Seem to be making out of the blue of the morning Something faery and fine, the shuttles sliding,
The red-gold spools of their hands and faces shuttling Hither and thither across the morn’s crystalline frame Of blue: trolls at the cave of ringing cerulean mining, And laughing with work, living their work like a game.
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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.