[John Whitworth]

This is New Statesman Competition 4138. Isn't a cento a poem made up entirely of lines from other poems? Sam Gwynn has written a famous one. If I am right then this competition is for a cento of at least fourteen lines. All the lines must be given attribution, poem and poet, and six of them must be by:

Shakespeare
Pam Ayres
G.M. Hopkins
Keats
William McGonagall
Alfred Austin

The other eight (or more) can be by any poet you choose. You can email your poem to comp@newstatesman.co.uk I forgot to get the closing date but it must be around the 4th of August. Any Brit passing Smith's could pop in and check that and then tell the rest of us.

Good luck!

Oh beautiful railway bridge of the silvery Tay,
Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day....

Hum! I need aline ALREADY WRITTEN which ends in 'depressing'. Or 'confessing'. Or....

[basil ransome-davies]

In the confusion that seems to reign at the Staggers these days, the rubric asks for 14ll 'at least' but also 14ll 'max'. I would be inclined to take the latter as prescriptive.
And they want it to 'make sense' – meaning, I suppose, that it should not be purely gonzo; the disparate lines have to be woven into some kind of coherence.

Closing date is August 5.

I'm feeling tired already.


bazza

[R. S. Gwynn]

John, could you post a link (if there is one) to the rules for this one?

[John Whitworth]

No, Sam, I couldn't. You can't get the NS on line unless you are a subscriber. I copied this down from a copy in a newsagents. What you have is (more or less) what I copied. Bazza corrects the closing date to the 5th August, and says the 14 lines is a max as well as a min. Apart from that, you have to make sense of what I took down. I mght nip into the senior Common Room in Kent in a couple of days and 'borrow' their copy, then give EXACTLY what t says, but that's the gist.

[basil ransome-davies]

You have SCR privileges at UKC?

[David Anthony]

I reckon I'm on to a winner here:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;

Now, all I need is another eight lines. Maybe Hopkins?

[John Whitworth]

Well not exactly, Bazza. But I do have a library ticket till 2030 and a hell of a lot of cheek. 'I'm Doctor Whitworth. I teach Creative Writing.' ought to shut them up. And am I Doctor Whitworth? Well, in the sense that Dr Paisley is Dr Paisley I am, though I never actually anted up. Who awarded me my doctorate? Why I did. Germans tend to send stuff to Dr Whitworth. Good on 'em.

Oh, and here's a cento. I know it's sixteen lines but I could easily lop two off. Then, of course, you could say it was short because of the repeated refrain. Very lambent, though I say so myself. I am left with redoubled admiration for Sam Gwynn. This sort of thing is bloody tricky. And David, you are of course cheating. Unless you can get the other five poets into the rest of your lines. Not asy when the divine Pam does not appear to have written many Iambic pentameter lines. I am very proud of my Austin line, which isn't a bad one, in my opinion.

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 silv'ry Tay,
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet!’
He opened the door and he walked down the street.

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day,
Oh! Ill-fated bridge of the silv'ry Tay!
Bid me to weep, and I will weep
Wide as the realms of air, or planet’s curving sweep.

Clasped like a missal where swart paynims pray,
Beautiful new railway bridge of the silvery Tay!


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: Hopkins: Sonnet: I Wake…
Line 6: McGonagall: The Tay Bridge Disaster
Line 7: Herrick: Bid Me To Live
Line 8: Austin: Love’s Trinity
Line 9: Spenser:: The Faerie Queen, The Song of the Rose
Line 10: McGonagall: The Tay Bridge Disaster
Line 11: Keats: Ode to a Nightingale
Line 12: Ayres: Arthur Dan Steeley. The Novelty Act
Line 13: Keats: The Eve of Saint Agnes
Line 14: McGonagall: An Address to the New Tay Bridge

Rewrite 2

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 silv'ry 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,
Oh! Ill-fated bridge of the silv'ry 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 Tay Bridge Disaster
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

[basil ransome-davies]

Oddly, I got mine from UKC. You'll need to ID your sources if you enter. You're right about Pam. I've been trawling through some of her generally unamusing doggerel & pentameters ain't exactly her thing. Of course we don't have to use them ourselves, but they're expedient if you're doing a modular assembly of multi-authored English verse lines.

All I have so far is:

Now is the winter of our discontent
In an immense wood in the south of Kent.

Believe it or not, line 2 is McGonagall. The placing of 'immense' is rather fine. I suppose there had to be the odd small gem in the mountain of tedious crap he produced.

[John Whitworth]

Doctor Bazz, brother of Doctor Jazz, presumably. Bloody well done, sir. Yeah, bloody Pam has made a little go a long way. And the McGonagall line is surprising. He was SUCH an expert at missing the pill, if you see what I mean.

Attributions all added!

Here is the New Statesman Competition EXACTLY as printed
__________________________________________________ ________________________
Competition Number 4138

We'd like synthetic poetry made up of at least 14 lines from named poems. At least one line must come from Shakespeare, Pam Ayres, G.M. Hopkins, Keats, McGonagall and Austin.

It must also make sense.

MAX 14 lines by 5 August to comp@newstatesman.co.uk
__________________________________________________ _________________________
I have rewritten my own entry to fall in with these requirements and (rather cunningly) made sure the judge cannot disqualify me from using the same line many times.

[Terese Coe]

John, "5 May" should be "5 August"[?]. And there's no requirement for ip, so no worries about Pam's short lines, eh?

BR-D,

Now is the winter of our discontent
In an immense wood in the south of Kent.

That's hilarious!