Speccie Patchwork Poetry
 

Of course WE know it's not patchwork poetry at all. It is a Cento, a form going back to classical times. Sam Gwynn produced the finest Cento in English but he's too much of a Southern Gentleman to chop a bit off and send it in. I wrote one somewhere and I'm no sort of a gentleman at all. I'll look it up.


No. 2763: patchwork poetry
You are invited to submit a poem that is composed of lines taken from well-known poems (16 lines maximum, no more than one line from any one poem and please identify sources). Email entries, wherever possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 5 September.

here it comes again
 

The trouble with this one is that it requires a ridiculous amount of work (hours if not days), and we end up writing nothing ourselves.

Yes, it's tough at the top, Brian. But ya gotta be Sisyphus, keep at it. I once won one of these, back in the day. I just wish I could remember the damn thing.

Here's the one I did then.


Silvery Tay

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,
Beautiful railway bridge of the silvery Tay?
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Both of them speak of something that is gone.

The whiles someone did chant this lovely lay.
‘Beautiful railway bridge of the silvery Tay,
So absolute she seems and in herself complete!’
He opened the door and he walked down the street.

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day,
Across the railway bridge of the silvery Tay!
Bid me to weep, and I will weep
Wide as the realms of air, or planet’s curving sweep.

Beautiful new railway bridge of the silvery Tay,
The breath of Winter comes from far away.


Line 1: Shakespeare: Sonnet 18
Line 2: McGonagall: The Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay
Line 3: Tennyson: Tithonus
Line 4: Wordsworth: Immortality Ode
Line 5: Spenser:: The Faerie Queen, The Song of the Rose
Line 6: McGonagall: The Tay Bridge Disaster
Line 7: Milton: Paradise Lost Book 8
Line 8: Ayres: Arthur Dan Steeley. The Novelty Act
Line 9: Hopkins: Sonnet: I Wake…
Line 10: McGonagall: The Newport Railway
Line 11: Herrick: Bid Me To Live
Line 12: Austin: Love’s Trinity
Line 13: McGonagall: An Address to the New Tay Bridge
Line 14: Keats: Isabella

Sisyphus? Nah, I can't stand the Rolling Stones.

This sounds to me like more work for less pleasure than any competition since the Shakespeare anagrams.

Tyger tyger, burning bright
Do not go gentle into that good night.




Yes, I know, it needs more than a couplet, but that's got to be the start of one...

Since I was born too late to hav received the kind of English education that consisted of being forced to learn half of Q's Oxford Book of English Verse by heart, I am counting myself out of this one

Où sont les autodidactes d'antan?

PATCHWORK POETRY

Oh blame me not if I no more can write.
In nothing art thou black, save in thy deeds.
Nor did I wonder at the lilies white;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
Thou mayst be false and yet I know it not,
How far I toil, still farther off from thee.
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
Beyond all date, even to eternity.
Oh never say that I was false of heart.
What is thy substance, whereof are you made?
For still temptation follows where thou art,
But now my gracious numbers are decayed.
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought.
Oh then vouchsafe me but this loving thought.

Shakespeare Sonnets 103, 131, 98, 94, 92, 28, 71, 122, 109, 53, 41, 79, 30, 32

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.

Gosh, you make me feel as if I've won already, so if I don't at least I'll always know I had endorsements from those whose opinions really matter to me!

Thanks, Annie and Bazza.

Jayne

For I will consider my dog Percy

A dog starved at his master's gate,
he eats his victuals fast enough.
Oh fat white doggie whom nobody loves,

oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit,
a huddled mastiff yearning to breathe free;
hope springs eternal in the canine breast.

Whilst thou art barking forth thy soul abroad
wagging thy tail in sprightly dance—
Down, wanton, down! Have you no shame?

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets.
By thy long white ears and quivering nose
now wherefore stopp'st thou at this tree?

"Is it weakness of intellect, doggie?" I cried.
The dog was ours before we were the dog's.


Apologies to: Christopher Smart, Wm Blake, AE Housman, Frances Cornford, Ezra Pound, Emma Lazarus, Alexander Pope, John Keats, Wm Wordsworth, Robert Graves, TS Eliot, ST Coleridge, WS Gilbert, Robert Frost

Err ... very nice, Esther, but haven't you changed some of the original words?

yes, Brian, I know it isn't kosher; I always cheat when I do centos.

http://www.umbrellajournal.com/summe...ies/Panto.html

I guess this just shows how tastes differ.. I'm enjoying this challenge, and really enjoyed the Shakespeare anagram one (though didn't win anything..)

Esther,
Heehee, your 'Panto' poem's funny! Thanks for the link. I like your doggie one too, even if it's not quite what this comp is calling for.

"hope springs eternal in the canine breast." I think it does, more often than not!

Jayne

Having spent a while on this it has been a treat to now read the poems you others have come up with. Hearty laughter ensued! My own isn't quite in that vein. I am uncertain of its worth, having neglected scansion. My rhymes are lax and few.


The Mariner’s Encounter

Round many western islands have I been.
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
I wandered lonely as a cloud;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Then after roaming far and wide
Shop after shop, with symbols, blazoned names,
I came upon her without warning,
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Finding thy worth a limit past my praise,
Full beautiful – a faery’s child!
Handsomest of all the women,
Such a carriage, such ease and such grace!

A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot;
And now it is an angel's song,
"O stay," the maiden said, "and rest
In the tea-shop’s ingle-nook.

Sources:

John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
William Topaz McGonagall, The Tay Bridge Disaster
William Wordsworth, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
WB Yeats, Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Robert Service, The Quest
William Wordsworth, The Prelude, book 7
Robert Graves, Darien
AE Housman, Loveliest of Trees

William Shakespeare, Sonnets, LXXXII
John Keats, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, IV
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hiawatha’s Wooing
Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, Fit the Second

Walt Whitman, I Sing the Body Electric, 5
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, V
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Excelsior
John Betjeman, In a Bath Tea-Shop

Well, having sweated blood over this one so far (and it's by no means over), I don't see why you co-conspirators shouldn't get spattered with some of the droplets:

In a vision once I saw
(The reason why, I cannot tell)
Only this, and nothing more -
The lovely lady, Christabel,
Talking of Michelangelo,
Of shoes, and ships, and sealing-wax.
Gazing where the lilies blow,
She gave her father forty whacks
Or in the heart, or in the head,
O'er rocks and stones following the dog ...
His Grace! Impossible! What, dead?
Body in the bog?

The grave’s a fine and private place;
I measured it from side to side,
Took the face-cloth from the face -
The dog it was that died!

Sources:
Coleridge - Kubla Khan
Tom Brown - I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
Poe - The Raven
Coleridge - Christabel
T.S.Eliot - The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Lewis Carroll - The Walrus and the Carpenter.
Tennyson - The Lady of Shalott
Popular rhyme about Lizzie Borden
Shakespeare - Tell me where is Fancy bred
Wordsworth - Fidelity
Swift - A satirical elegy
Seamus Heaney - Punishment
Marvell - To his coy Mistress
Wordsworth - The Thorn
Tennyson - Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead
Goldsmith - Elegy on the Death of a mad Dog

I think that's wonderfully hectic.. especially at the end!

Do the people who set these magazine competions have a go themselves, do you think? Just to try out the practicalities?

Welcome, Graham,
It's nice to see a new member heading straight for D & A! :)

"Do the people who set these magazine compet[it]ions have a go themselves, do you think? Just to try out the practicalities?"

(Sorry, Graham, in my role as Deputy Word Nerd Police Officer I had to correct your spelling above.)
But, to answer your question: personally I'd say, "No, I don't imagine they do." I could be wrong, of course.

I think your 'Mariner's Encounter' is a valiant effort at a stinker of a contest, but - for me, at any rate - some lines are just too incongruous in the places you've put them, such as S1L4. It doesn't fit, whereas S2 does. S3 continues the 'story' but then the last stanza makes it go a bit awry.

This is only my humble opinion, FWIW, but I think you have a nice premise here, if you can tweak it into a slightly more coherent form.

Jayne

Those who set them do sometimes have a go. And if the name is Bill Greenwell, they win!

Ah, yes, of course.

When Graham asked the question, John, I was thinking in terms of 'them' being Lucy from The Spectator and Tessa Castro from The Oldie. For some reason, I can't imagine them writing poetry - but who knows? Perhaps they do.

I was forgetting that those who set the competitions are sometimes ordinary mortals.

... or Adair R Fyn.

But if the name is 'Brian Allgar', they don't win (sniff).

An expense of eyesight in a waste of time . . . but if anyone fails to detect the deep thematic coherence between S1 and S2 I''ll set the hounds of spring on them.


Where is the world we roved, Ned Bunn?
And Marion, cow-eyed,
The lovely Mary Morison
Wearing white for Easter-tide.

Between the acres of the rye
Below the gallows’ tree! -
In shards the sylvan vases lie,
At Abdon under Clee.


Herman Melville :To Ned
W.H. Auden: Song of the Master and Boatswain
R. Burns: Mary Morison
A.E. Housman: Loveliest of Trees SL II

W. Shakespeare: It Was A Lover and His Lass
Thomas Hood: The Last Man
Herman Melville: The Ravaged Villa
A.E. Housman: Fancy’s Knell LP XLI

It's not the winning, Jerome. Jayne's going to do that. It's the taking part. Like the Olympics, don't you know.

Unfortunately, John, it's not quite like the Olympics, as I can't see any way of cheating.

Poets don't cheat, Brian. Poets STEAL.

Christmas with the In-Laws Up North

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets
generations have trod, have trod, have trod,
for a journey, and such a long journey.

We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls
knock-kneed, coughing like hags. We cursed through sludge
where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies.

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
Dear God! The very houses seem asleep.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
and eat three pounds of sausages at a go.

The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, Eliot / God’s Grandeur, Hopkins / Journey of the Magi, Eliot / Whitsun Weddings, Larkin / Dulce et Decorum Est, Owen / Ode to a Nightingale, Keats / Anthem for Doomed Youth, Owen / Upon Westminster Bridge, Wordsworth / Ulysses, Tennyson / Warning, Jenny Joseph.

Nice one, Mary! :D

That looks effortlessly smooth - when we all know it's not an effortless exercise, by any means!

Jayne

Thanks Jayne! I was pleased to wring some sort of sense out of it. I can't even imagine the effort of making it rhyme too like yours. I think I need to buy more anthologies. :)