Cento: Sunshine to Silver Twilight
Old Mother Earth woke up from her sleep,
The great winds utter prophecies,
The cymbals crash,
The soul of music shed,
Sing, and the hills will answer,
The voices call in the waters flow,
The fields gleam mildly back upon the sky,
The long withered grass in the sunshine glancing,
The Sky begins to part,
The sun's last fading gleam,
Wake! The silver dusk is returning,
The evening star does shine,
The dim trees beat the dark,
And I travel the road alone
Editor's note: The cento form in poetry dates back to Homer and Virgil. The term comes
from the Latin word for "patchwork." Consequently, centos are sometimes referred
to as a "collage poems," because their lines are borrowed from other sources rather
than being original. The art of crafting a cento, however, is less like collage and
more like the art of film editing, a matter of image sequencing and juxtaposition.
Just as film editors take footage shot by cinematographers and create "the final cut"
of a film, Hannah Clingman has crafted her "Cento: Sunshine to Silver Twilight," using
poetic sensibilities unique to her in collaboration, line by line, with the following sources:
1) "A Spring Song" - anonymous
2) "Prelude to Part First" - Sir Launfal
3) "A Victory Dance" - Alfred Noyes
4) "The Harp that Once Through Tara's Halls" - Thomas Moore
5) "Solitude" - Ella Wheeler Wilcox
6) "Sometime at Eve" - Elizabeth Clark Hardy
7) "Pray to What Earth" - Henry David Thoreau
8) "My Soul is Awakened" - Anne Bronte
9) "The Owls" - Charles Baudelaire
10) "Wake: The Silver Dusk Returning" - A.E. Housman
11) "Night" - William Blake
12) "Walking At Night" - Amary Hare