Cento [attribution]

The mummy cloths expose an ancient breast. [Dylan Thomas]

My enemy had bidden me as guest. [Norman Cameron]

How he would place his hand beside his ear, [Samuel Taylor Coleridge]

O where are you going? Stay with me here! [W.H. Auden]

The clouds cast moving shadows on the land.  [Philip Larkin]

I fly to thee, and fully understand [George Herbert]

No genuine insight ever comes to her.  [William Wordsworth]

I am the lost heart of a murderer [Margaret Atwood]

The daughter, with hands outstretched to the fire [Stephen Spender]

And cots, and hamlets, and faint city-spire; [Samuel Taylor Coleridge]

How oft hereafter will she wax and wane; [Omar Khayyám/Edward FitzGerald]

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain. [Vladimir Nabokov]

So through that unripe day you bore your head, [Philip Larkin]

Impinging on the slow shores of the dead.  [Kenneth Allott]

And all thy heart lies open unto me. [Alfred, Lord Tennyson]

Like life and fear, a dark reality.  [Percy Bysshe Shelley]

Your body that includes everything [Margaret Atwood]

Are you prepared for what the night will bring?  [Philip Larkin]

Love paired ascends as beating wings in flight – [keyfeatures]

proud nowhere of earth’s most prodigious night [e.e. cummings]

All things recall one heart-sick memory;- [Walter de la Mare]

A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me. [Alfred, Lord Tennyson]

Buds of invention many a hundred year, [Thomas Carew]

Gleam delicately through the azure clear;   [John Keats]

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold, [John Keats]

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; [W.B. Yeats]

We too eat and grow fat, you aren’t content, [Margaret Atwood]

When I walk out, I am a great event.  [Sylvia Plath]

You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage; [John Donne]

The debts of our penurious bankrupt age; [Thomas Carew]

But you are you, Time is not yours alone, [David Gascoyne]

I can reduce all feelings but this one. [Lord Byron]

If hands could free you, heart, where would you fly?  [Philip Larkin]

Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by,  [William Shakespeare]

Yet works on uselessly with shortened breath.  [Philip Larkin]

Is this my lover then?  This death, this death?  [Sylvia Plath]

The still, sad music of humanity,  [William Wordsworth]

So much for art.  So much for prophecy.  [Margaret Atwood]