Sourcing a Superlative Cento (Accidental Poetry Month, Part 13)

Centos -- poems composed by quoting lines from previously existing poems -- have been mentioned on this blog before; in the latter case, I did what I propose to do here, and cited sources for all the lines from one of my favorite centos. (The word is pronounced with a soft c, incidentally -- 'sento'.) This cento is by R. S. Gwynn (what a marvelously voweless* name!); I found it on p. 68-69 of the anthology Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism. Oddly, despite that book's having an index of forms, and including this cento, they don't list "cento" among the forms the book uses.

Anyway, first just the cento, with no links, so you can just enjoy it as a poem (and personally I think it's a very good one).

Approaching a Significant Birthday, He
Peruses The Norton Anthology of Poetry

All human things are subject to decay.
Beauty is momentary in the mind.
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
And somewhat of a sad perplexity.
Here, take my picture, though I bid farewell,
In a dark time the eye begins to see

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall—
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
What but design of darkness to appall?
An aged man is but a paltry thing.

If I should die, think only this of me:
Crass casualty obstructs the sun and rain
When I have fears that I may cease to be,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain

And hear the spectral singing of the moon
And strictly meditate the thankless muse.
The world is too much with us, late and soon.
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze.

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.
Again he raised the jug up to the light:
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.

Downward to darkness on extended wings,
Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O sea,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
I do not think that they will sing to me.

-- R. S. Gwynn

Anyone who's read even a little English poetry will recognize some -- maybe even many -- of those lines. They are all -- as the title of course indicates -- extremely famous. Nevertheless, as a public (not-really-all-that-significant-a) service, here is the poem again, with each line linked to its original source:

Approaching a Significant Birthday, He
Peruses The Norton Anthology of Poetry

All human things are subject to decay.
Beauty is momentary in the mind.
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
And somewhat of a sad perplexity.
Here, take my picture, though I bid farewell,
In a dark time the eye begins to see

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall—
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
What but design of darkness to appall?
An aged man is but a paltry thing.

If I should die, think only this of me:
Crass casualty obstructs the sun and rain
When I have fears that I may cease to be,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain
And hear the spectral singing of the moon
And strictly meditate the thankless muse.
The world is too much with us, late and soon.
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze.

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.
Again he raised the jug up to the light:
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.

Downward to darkness on extended wings,
Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O sea,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
I do not think that they will sing to me.

-- R. S. Gwynn

And here's a list of the sources, in order:

John Dryden, "Mac Flecknoe"
Wallace Stevens, "Peter Quince at the Clavier"
Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"
Percy Bysshe Shelly, "Ode to the West Wind"

John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale"
William Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey"
John Donne, "Elegie: His Picture"
Theodore Roethke, "In a Dark Time"

Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Tithonus"
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73
Robert Frost, "Design"
William Butler Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium"

Robert Brooke, "The Soldier"
Thomas Hardy, "Hap"
John Keats, "When I have fears that I may cease to be"
John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale"

John Crowe Ransom, "Piazza Piece"
John Milton, "Lycidas"
William Wordsworth, "The World is Too Much With Us"
Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur"

Dylan Thomas, "Do not go gentle into that good night"
John Milton, "Lycidas"
Edwin Arlington Robinson, "Mr. Flood's Party"
Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses"

Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning"
Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Break, Break, Break"
William Shakespeare, Richard II, 3:2.
T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

I suppose that just reading the 26 poems quoted in that one poem would be a pretty decent syllabus for an introduction to English poetry. (Not a perfect one, to be sure -- I note, just as a fer'instance, that there isn't a single female poet on the list). Most are very famous -- several are among the most famous poems in the language -- although in a number of cases (Donne, Roethke, Ransom, Hardy, Robinson) I hadn't heard of that particular poem previously, although I knew other poems by all of them (indeed, many poems fairly well in some cases). Rupert Brooke I don't think I'd ever heard of at all.

A couple of further notes:

• Gwynn twice uses two lines from a single poem: Lines 5 & 16 are both from Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale"; Lines 18 & 22 are both from Milton's Lycidas. (Thus, while there are 28 lines in Gwynn's poem, it has only 26 poems for sources.)

• Gwynn uses lines by 20 poets. He takes three lines each from Tennyson (from three separate poems) and Keats (two lines from one poem, one from another); he uses two lines each from Stevens, Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Milton (in the first three cases, from two separate poems; in the final case, two lines from one poem). That's half the poem. The other fourteen lines come from fourteen different writers.

• In Gwynn's use of Hopkins in line 20, he doesn't actually use the entire line, which in its original setting is "It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil". For his antepenultimate line, Gwynn makes a single line out of what was a pair of lines in its original home in Tennyson's poem. These are the only times that Gwynn uses something other than a single, full line of poetry from another source. (Unlike Harry Mathews, I might add.)

• I'm curious about whether all these poems are really in the Norton Anthology of Poetry (do they include speeches from Shakespeare's plays, for instance?), but not curious enough to check.

Finally, a word about the poem overall. I said above that I thought that Gwynn's was a very good poem in its own right. A cynic might note that of course it was a good poem: he stole from 26 of the best poems in the language! And there's some truth in that, I suppose. But of course he didn't just pick lines higglety-pigglety. He put them in an order that made sense -- a new (and interesting and aesthetically powerful) sense that none of the original poems had. And he did so in a way that followed his own aesthetic form (alternating quatrains, quoth the back-matter of Rebel Angels). So while he may not have written any of the lines, he definitely wrote the poem -- which is to say, he created its structure and its meaning. All this is just to defend collage as a genuine artistic practice, which despite its obvious validity in power is somehow always needs redoing.** But as Montaigne said, there have been a great many centos, including "some very ingenious ones". And there have been many equally so since Montaigne wrote; among which I'd number this poem of R. S. Gwynn's creation.

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* Yes, I know 'y' counts as a vowel.

** I grant this is an odd way to put it, since the cento is an ancient form, while collage was invented by Picasso. But for all cento's age, it remains an obscure practice; while collage is done, I'd guess, in every preschool in America.