In the grey skirts of the fog seamews skirl desolately, And flick like bits of paper propelled by a wind About the flabby sails of a departing ship Crawling slowly down the low reaches Of the river. About the keel there is a bubbling and gurgling Of grumpy water; And as the prow noses out a way for itself, It seems to weave a dream of bubbles and flashing foam, A dream of strange islands whereto it is bound: Pearl islands drenched with the dawn. The palms flash under the immense dark sky, Down which the sun dives to embrace the earth: Drums boom and conches bray, And with a crash of crimson cymbals Suddenly appears above the polished backs of slaves A king in a breastplate of gold Gigantic Amid tossed roses and swaying dancers That melt into pale undulations and muffled echoes 'Mid the bubbling of the muddy lumpy water, And the swirling of the seamews above the sullen river.
Between me and the woods along the bay The swallows circle through the darkling mist, The robins breast the grass, and they divide This solitude with me. The rippling sea And sunset clouds, the sea gulls' flashing flight From looming isles beyond — I watch them now With a new sense. Where are the swallows' young, And where the robins' nests? Year after year They hover round this ancient house, and I, Within as heedless, saw the long years pass, Nor ever dreamed a day like this might come — A day when mourners go about the street For one who always loved his fellow-men. The windflower trembles in the woods, the sod Is full of violets, the orchards rain Their scented blossoms. May unfolds its leaves — Nature's eternal mystery to renew. Must man be less than leaf or flower, and end? If I go hence, when this departed soul Has left no human tie to bind me now, When spring unfolds, and I recall his past, Will their remembrance lead me here again, To teach me that his spirit comes to show That Nature is eternal for man's sake?
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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.