NaPoWriMo (Day 30): Darkling stars

For the month of April, I’m writing a poem a day from prompts on https://www.napowrimo.net. You can click on the headlines (Day One, etc) to view/add comments. There’s also a list of participants’ sites below the site header.

30
 
Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a cento. This is a poem that is made up of lines taken from other poems. If you’d like to dig into an in-depth example, here’s John Ashbery’s cento “The Dong with the Luminous Nose,” and here it is again, fully annotated to show where every line originated. A cento might seem like a complex undertaking – and one that requires you to have umpteen poetry books at your fingertips for reference – but you don’t have to write a long one.
 
 

Darkling stars (a Cento)

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
did wander darkling in the eternal space. ¹
I imagined you a fellow traveller

on this arid ground. But there’s no thing

that resembles you on earth. ² 

To see a world in a grain of sand

and a heaven in a wild flower, 

hold infinity in the palm of your hand 

and eternity in an hour. ³

So pure the sky, so quiet was the air!

So like, so very like, was day to day! ⁴

Sun glints from the frozen river.

This is the roof of the earthball.

Silence. ⁵

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   

when the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   

my father, digging. I look down. ⁶ 

Where sunless rivers weep

their waves into the deep,

she sleeps a charmed sleep: ⁷

“Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair   

and I eat men like air.” ⁸

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

licked its tongue into the corners of the evening. ⁹

The moon arose up in the murky East,

a white and shapeless mass. ¹⁰

[The man] will fall asleep at last inside the shade of his blue lamp

as the islands crawl like huge moths over the globe. ¹¹

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, May 1, 2022

The poems selected:

1. Byron, Darkness

2. Giacomo Leopardi, To His Lady

3. William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

4. William Wordsworth, Elegiac Stanzas

5. Tomas Transtromer, Along the Lines

6. Seamus Heaney, Digging

7. Christina Rossetti, Dreamland

8. Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus

9. Prufrock, TS Eliot

10. Shelley, The Waning Moon

11. Tomas Transtromer, Breathing Space July