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