Context Is For the Curious
Literary September 11th, 2007I was at the library today, doing research for my intellectual property essay on copyright, and I was reading through the book The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination by Paul K. Saint-Amour. One of the chapters mentioned a type of poetry work I’ve never heard of before, called a Cento, which is basically taking verses of existing poetry and putting them together to create a new one. Apparently, this has been around for ages, and it demonstrates how this is an example of how copying and remixing to form new works has been around for years.
Anyway, the book quotes a particular cento that I found to be positively charming (if not a bit frivolous). It is quoted from another book called Gleanings from the Harvest-Fields of Literature A Melange of Excerpta, Curious, Humorous, and Instructive by C. C. Bombaugh, first published in 1870 (this book sounds quite interesting, I must try to find a copy) of an anonymous cento involving a rather dramatic (albeit a bit confusing) retelling of a love story. I’ve taken the liberty of researching for the author of each line to their original works, and linking to them when I could find a source (this took much longer than expected).
| Mosaic Poetry | |
| I only knew she came and went | Lowell |
| Like troutlets in a pool; | Hood |
| She was a phantom of delight, | Wordsworth |
| And I was like a fool. | Eastman |
| “One kiss, dear maid,” I said and sighed, | Coleridge |
| “Out of those lips unshorn.” | Longfellow |
| She shook her ringlets round her head, | Stoddard |
| And laughed in merry scorn. | Tennyson |
| Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky | Tennyson |
| You hear them, oh my heart? | Alice Carey1 |
| ‘Tis twelve at night by the castle clock, | Coleridge |
| Beloved, we must part! | Alice Carey |
| “Come back! Come back!” she cried in grief | Campbell |
| “My eyes are dim with tears - | Bayard Taylor |
| How shall I live through all the days, | Mrs. Osgood |
| All through a hundred years?” | TS Perry |
| ‘Twas in the prime of the summer time, | Hood |
| She blessed me with her hand; | Hoyt |
| We strayed together, deeply blest, | Mrs. Edwards |
| Into the Dreaming Land. | Cornwall |
| The laughing bridal roses blow, | Patmore |
| To dress her dark brown hair; | Bayard Taylor |
| No maiden may with her compare, | Brailsford |
| Most beautiful, most rare! | Read |
| I clasped it on her sweet cold hand, | Browning2 |
| The precious golden link; | Smith |
| I calmed her fears, and she was calm, | Coleridge |
| “Drink, pretty creature, drink!” | Wordsworth |
| And so I won my Genevieve, | Coleridge |
| And walked in Paradise; | Hervey3 |
| The fairest thing that ever grew | Wordsworth4 |
| Atween me and the skies. | Osgood |
1 Spelt “Alice Cary” in modern days.
2 Not too sure on this one, lots of Brownings who write literary works and none I found that exactly match the line.
3 Maybe a miscredit? I couldn’t find anyone by the name of “Hervey” having written that line, but Aldrich did use that line in his poem written around that time.
4 The line that Wordsworth uses is actually “The sweetest thing that ever grew”.
I’m no English major but… is it just me or does the content of the poem refer to the (presumably male) protagonist successfully wooing a lady he fancied with… alcohol?
6 Responses to “Context Is For the Curious”
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It’s like an olden day date-rape, hah!
While the particular cento you’ve quoted is quite fun, I am more interested in the copyright aspect to it (typical me).
Not that this is really relevant to the entry, but I was looking at the Open University (through which I’ll be studying my upcoming web dev certificate) today and have found law courses to be extremely expensive. I don’t know what I was expecting, but even a basic starter in it was nearly 5 times what I’m paying for my web course! Oh well, I’ll have to stick to freebie Internet education on copyright and law for the time being ;)
Wow, that’s a pretty cool concept. The poem is nice, too. A lot of times I find myself loving a particular line in a poem, and this makes me want to try “writing” a Cento.
To Jem: Well the poem kinda highlights the absurdity and artificiality of copyright. Copyright laws kinda started publishers wanted to protect their economic interests in selling books once printing of books became available and people started pirating books. Authors used to have “patrons”; i.e. wealthy people who paid them to write, so they didn’t always depend on the public consumption of their works. Some authors like to CLAIM that there’s a “natural right” to copyrighting one’s work (the idea that authors own their works actually only started up in the 18th to 19th century), but people have openly and discretely copied and plagiarised throughout the centuries without legal repercussions.
Heck, if centos are literary works done through selecting bits and pieces of existing poems/prose, then it’s no less better or worse than celebrity blends IMO. It’s just a matter of good and bad centos, and good and bad celebrity blends. :P I don’t know the legal status of centos written in this day and age but it’s likely that the lines taken might be considered copyright infringement. =/
I’m sorry to hear the courses are so expensive! Law degree is one of the most expensive degrees to get here too (yay for not needing to fork out money for my education yet!), not to mention, usually relatively lengthy!
Nice. Centos remind me of magnetic poetry because they’re created by cutting, splicing, and rearranging pieces that already exist. They should be legal… :)
Here’s a copy of Charles Carroll Bombaugh’s book:
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=AGC9971.0001.001
I want to go back to school. I hate this “real world” crap. :(
Oooh neat, thanks for the link! I’ll have a look through it! :D
It makes me wonder how well versed someone must be in a particular literary field in order to steal appropriate lines from such a wide range of authors.
Legal issues aside, it’s fairly impressive!