Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part.
(Michael Drayton: Since there’s no help)
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again.
(John Donne: Batter my heart)
To you I gave my whole weak wishing heart.
(Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Farewell to Love)
It was great wrong you did me; and for gain.
(Rupert Brooke: A Memory)

So do our minutes hasten to their end.
(William Shakespeare: Sonnet No. 60)
Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand.
(Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Go from me)
Someday you certainly will comprehend,
(Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots: Sonnet 10)
When you can no more hold me by the hand.
(Christina Rossetti: Remember)

For conversation, when we meet again,
(Edna St Vincent Millay: ‘I, being born a woman and distressed’)
And thus reflecting, you will never see
(Thomas Hardy: She, to Him – 2 )
A rain of tears, a cloud of dark disdain.
(Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Lover Compareth his State to a Ship in Perilous Storm Tossed on the Sea)
O give me back the days of loose and free.
(Henry Longfellow: Youth and Age)

Nor let us weep that our delight is fled,
(Percy Bysshe Shelley: Adonais)
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d.
(John Keats: Ode on Melancholy)
Lying apart now, each in a separate bed.
(Elizabeth Jennings: One Flesh)
What better excuse to go out and get pissed?
(Sean O’Brien: from Notes on the Use of the Library (Basement Annexe))

Oh Jayne, that's lovely.

A cento that makes sense! Well done, Jayne.
Centos are such hard work - I've just about given up.

Yes, great stuff, Jayne. You've done it the hard way, not just sixteen different lines but sixteen different poets. John's Shakespearean one made me check the rubrics and indeed it does say different poems and not different poets so he's within the rubric too. I'd misread them, so hadn't got much further than a series of false starts;

In shards the sylvan vases lie (Melville)
Between the acres of the rye (Shakespeare)

or
Among the saints he shall be seen (Eliot)
Safe at the Dorchester hotel (Betjeman)

Ah well, back to the something or other.

Jayne, Yours is surely a winner and deserves to be the only one .
Faced with such apparently easy excellence I shall withdraw from this Comp. and consign my own assorted piles of ill-matched dog-ends to the bin.

Normal life can now be resumed. Thank God!

Jayne, that's brilliant! Not only does it make pretty good sense, but it has a very funny punchline.

I don't know how you did it. I'm really struggling (mind you, I'm trying to do one with tetrameters, which doesn't help). Apart from making sense, the great problem is finding lines with the required end-rhymes. Is there, unknown to me, some kind of concordance that gives them, or did you have all those lines in your head?

So far, all I've got is one quatrain, which has taken me longer than three normal entries:

I wandered lonely as a cloud,
Alone and palely loitering,
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
And I am happy when I sing.

Wordsworth : Daffodils l. 1
Keats: La Belle Dame sans Merci l.2
Blake: Infant Sorrow l.3
Wordsworth: The Mad Mother l. 13

John, George, Jerome, Martin and Brian,

Thank you for your appreciative remarks. This poem took me many hours of 'research' - thumbing through hundreds of pages just scanning the end words for one that I wanted, that also had the right metre. I almost gave up lots of times.

It's totally bizarre to end up with something that I haven't actually written one word of!

Jayne

"... thumbing through hundreds of pages just scanning the end words for one that I wanted, that also had the right metre"

Yep, that sounds a familiar process. Except that in my case, it seems that those poxy poets have scrupulously avoided using the end-rhymes that I'm looking for. I'm sure they did it just to spite me.

Respect, Jayne!

I rarely predict, but it's hard to imagine that many entries will outdo Jayne's.