As a reed [a cento]

In truth the prison, into we which we doom ourselves, no prison is—
but as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen.

I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags,
awake forever in a sweet unrest,
as a reed with the reeds in the river
till a’ the seas gang dry.

The lines of this cento are taken from, respectively: William Wordsworth, TS Eliot, Walt Whitman, John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Burns


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