I pray to be the tool which to your hand Long use has shaped and moulded till it be Apt for your need, and, unconsideringly, You take it for its service. I demand To be forgotten in the woven strand Which grows the multi-coloured tapestry Of your bright life, and through its tissues lie A hidden, strong, sustaining, grey-toned band. I wish to dwell around your daylight dreams, The railing to the stairway of the clouds, To guard your steps securely up, where streams A faëry moonshine washing pale the crowds Of pointed stars. Remember not whereby You mount, protected, to the far-flung sky.
Mute is thy wild harp, now, O Bard sublime! Who, amid Scotia’s mountain solitude, Great Nature taught to “build the lofty rhyme,” And even beneath the daily pressure, rude, Of laboring Poverty, thy generous blood, Fired with the love of freedom—Not subdued Wert thou by thy low fortune: But a time Like this we live in, when the abject chime Of echoing Parasite is best approved, Was not for thee—Indignantly is fled Thy noble Spirit; and no longer moved By all the ills o’er which thine heart has bled, Associate worthy of the illustrious dead, Enjoys with them “the Liberty it loved.”
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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.