Making Sense of Centos

A fun challenge

If you like to read old and new poetry, if your mind is open to a sort of playful recombination of famous or not-so-famous lines, if you are not overly attached to structure and meaning but consider these two things more like guidelines than rules, you might enjoy creating a cento poem. I knew nothing of these things until

David Angel

and

Carole Roseland

posted theirs. So, here goes!

Intro: Some of my favorite poems merged as my narrator tries to convey a great and spiritual love, which unfortunately devolved into nothing more than unrequited passion. It is entitled: “Loving Ideas is Easier than Loving Someone”

Prologue Poem that explains centos:

Something quite new to me
Yet somewhere in the third or fourth century
A poem called "cento" came to be.

A patchwork or collage
Often used to pay homage
-A poet using decoupage!

One hundred or ten lines
From any poem you can find
Becomes a puzzle in your mind.

AI: Young love, first love.

1   My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
2   A tree that looks at God all day
3   And lifts her leafy arms to pray
4   Of those who are older than we-
5   Of many far wiser than we-
6   A mind at peace with all below.

7   The fullness of your bliss I feel
8   -I feel it all!
9   Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
10 It is impossible to say just what I mean!

Credits by line:

1 “Sonnet 43”, Elizabeth Browning

2&3 “Trees”, Joyce Kilmer

4&5 “Annabel Lee”, Edgar Allan Poe

6 “She Walks in Beauty Like the Night”, Lord Byron

7&8 “Ode: Intimations of Immortality & Recollections of Early Childhood”, W. Wordsworth

9&10 ”The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, TS Eliot.