Cento No. 3
I have been one of the fortunate ones of the earth
Inside my eden I can find no snake.
Wisdom and spirit of the universe!
There are so many things I have forgot
I will write a sketch of my early life:
All thoughts, all passions, all delights
(The brain is a network of connections of cells).
In these deep solitudes and awful cells
It occurred to me that we should write down the names of the dead.
I am afraid to think about my death,
Wisdom and spirit of the universe!
From where I sit, I see the stars.
I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost
(I have had playmates I have had companions)
I have been thinking of the long arms of peasant girls
I know what my heart is like.
Under the wide and starry sky
I walk the old frequented ways.
At school, I sometimes read a book
(When I read Shakespeare, I am struck with wonder).
I had a dream, which was not all a dream:
I drove a golf-ball into the air
(Most dreams are like the tide upon the beach;
My own dim life should teach me this).
Out of the night that covers me
I trust I have not wasted breath.
Wisdom and spirit of the universe!
I’ve trod the links with many a man
I have a boy of five years old
I will tell my son over and over again
These are the saddest of possible words:
There may be chaos still around the world
(I like relativity and quantum theories),
I begin to understand the old men, parked on benches.
****
Sources for Cento No. 3
“On the Beach at Night Alone” by Walt Whitman
“A Man Said to the Universe” by Stephen Crane
“Courage” by Arthur Christopher Benson
“The Poem of a Prisoner of War, 1917” by Stanley de Vere Alexander Julius
“No Snake” by Annie Finch
“Influence of Natural Objects in Calling Forth and Strengthening the Imagination in Boyhood and Early
Youth” by William Wordsworth
“The Word” by Edward Thomas
“The Author’s Early Life” by Julia Moore
“The Power of Science” by James Brunton Stephens
“Brain Litany: Or, Overcoming the Existential Factor,” “Too Much Has Resisted Us,” and “Sherbourne
Morning” by Pier Giorgio Di Cicco
“Eloisa to Abelard” by Alexander Pope
“The List” by Albert Frank Moritz
“No Coward’s Song” by James Elroy Flecker
“Winter Trees” by William Carlos Williams
“Midnight” by Archibald Lampman
“Love’s Deity” by John Donne
“The Old Familiar Faces” by Charles Lamb
“Ebb” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
“Requiem” by Robert Louis Stevenson
“What Should I Say” by Sir Thomas Wyatt
“The Ballade of the Incompetent Ballade-Monger” and “My Education” by James Kenneth Stephen
“Behind the Closed Eye” by Francis Ledwidge
“When I Read Shakespeare” and “Relativity” by David Herbert Lawrence
“Darkness” by George Gordon Lord Byron
“The Golf-ball and the Loan” by Robert Fuller Murray
“Dreams” by Charles Tennyson Turner
From In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII, “XXXIV” and “CXXI” by Alfred Lord Tennyson
“I.M.R.T Hamilton Bruce (1846-1899)” by William Ernest Henley
“Yesterday” by Edgar Albert Guest
“Burning River” by Simon Joseph Ortiz
From Lyrical Ballads, “Anecdote for Fathers, Shewing How the Art of Lying May Be Taught” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth
“Baseball’s Sad Lexicon” by Franklin Pierce Adams
“There May Be Chaos Still Around the World” by George Santayana
∞
James Andrew lives, works, and writes in Schenectady, NY.
