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.
And in short, I was afraid.

Tomorrow, night will come again,
under the ghost of the moon,
soon, too soon —
with slow, faint steps, and much exceeding pain.

Who knows but the world will end tonight?
It cannot hold you long.
You tell me I am wrong.
All right. All right.
Bill Greenwell

Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part.
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again.
To you I gave my whole weak wishing heart.
It was great wrong you did me; and for gain.

So do our minutes hasten to their end.
Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand.
Someday you certainly will comprehend,
When you can no more hold me by the hand.

For conversation, when we meet again,
And thus reflecting, you will never see
A rain of tears, a cloud of dark disdain.
O give me back the days of loose and free.

Nor let us weep that our delight is fled,
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d.
Lying apart now, each in a separate bed.
What better excuse to go out and get pissed?
Jayne Osborn

Among the pickled foetuses and bottled bones,
In a dark time, the eye begins to see
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything.
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil.
I sing what was lost and dread what was won,
And I hold within my hand
Deserts of vast eternity.

This is my letter to the world,
Not a red rose or a satin heart.
Sentiment will creep in. I cast it out.
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

Out of a misty dream
The hour of the waning of love has beset us,
For all our joys are but fantastical.
What happens to a dream deferred?
The mysteries remain.
G.M. Davis

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
By this still hearth, among these barren crags
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
Near yonder copse, where once the garden smil’d,
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.
The unpurged images of day recede:
And Monuments, like Men, submit to Fate:
The curfew tolls the bell of parting day.

I summon up remembrance of things past;
(O for a beaker full of the warm South!)
To love and grief tribute of verse belongs:
Time will say nothing but I told you so;
I have been one acquainted with the night,
Where joy for ever dwells. Hail, horrors! hail!
Rage, rage against the dying of the light! —
And may there be no sadness of farewell.
Carolyn Thomas-Coxhead

No. 2766: taking fright

You are invited to submit a poem about a phobia (16 lines maximum).
Email entries, wherever possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 26
September.