Patchwork poetry

In Competition No. 2763 you were invited to submit a poem that is
composed of lines taken from well-known poems, with no more than one line taken
from any single poem.

This was a brute of a challenge, but it
did pull in the crowds. Semi-nonsense was fine as long as it was amusing but I
was especially impressed by those who managed to knit together something that
made sense.

Commendations
to Geoffrey Tapper, Gerard Benson, Margaret Howell and Gordon MacIntyre. There
is no overall winner this week but those printed below earn a well-deserved £25
each.

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,
With dream and thought and feeling interwound.
With thoughtful pace, and sad, majestic eyes,
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.

I have been one acquainted with the night,
But you are mobile as the veering air.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

If I should die, think only this of me:
His creed was godliness and godlessness.
Then love is sin, and let me sinful be —
tomorrow is our permanent address.

O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
For I myself shall like to this decay.
What can we reason, but from what we know?
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.
Chris O’Carroll

I have been one acquainted with the night
When I was wont to greet it with my lays,
A chamber deaf to noise and blind to light
I say — but not in self-dispute but praise.
Even from the tomb the voice of Nature cries:
My lauded beauties carried off from me,
With stillness that is almost Paradise
I lived with visions for my company.
And now with gleams of half-extinguished thought
I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers
That tawny Incas for their gardens wrought,
And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers
What scenes appear where’er I turn my view —
So various, so beautiful, so new!
Frank McDonald

How easy it is to make a ghost
in hat of antique shape, and cloak of grey,
Without all hope of day:
for the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy
coast —

shade more than man, more image than a shade –
in a slow silent walk
talking the way they talked.