Four days the earth was rent and torn By bursting steel, The houses fell about us; Three nights we dared not sleep, Sweating, and listening for the imminent crash Which meant our death.
The fourth night every man, Nerve-tortured, racked to exhaustion, Slept, muttering and twitching, While the shells crashed overhead.
The fifth day there came a hush; We left our holes And looked above the wreckage of the earth To where the white clouds moved in silent lines Across the untroubled blue.
A red rose in the garden sighed To be the south wind's happy bride, And when the rover wooing came Her heart with love was all aflame. With honeyed word and soft caress He won his bride of loveliness, And all her leaves so warm and fair He scattered, ah! I know not where.
A stately lily, standing near, From every wooer turned her ear With dignity that nearly froze, As though to chide the foolish rose. Nor came there lover with the art To charm her cold, unfeeling heart; She glanced disdainfully at them Until she withered on her stem.
Oh, mingled joys that blight and bless! Which knew the truer happiness, — The lily pure with heart of frost, Or warm, red rose that loved and lost?
—
—
0:00
0:00
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.