The Dong with the Luminous Nose [annotated]
(A cento)
[title from Edward Lear’s “The Dong with a Luminous Nose”]
Within a windowed niche of that high hall
[Lord Byron, “The Battle of Waterloo”]
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
[Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day’]
I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
[T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”]
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks
[Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”]
From camp to camp, through the foul womb of night.
[William Shakespeare, “Henry V”]
Come, Shepherd, and again renew the quest.
[Matthew Arnold, “The Scholar Gypsy”]
And birds sit brooding in the snow.
[William Shakespeare, “Love’s Labour’s Lost”]
Continuous as the stars that shine,
[William Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”]
When all men were asleep the snow came flying
[Robert Bridges, “London Snow”]
Near where the dirty Thames does flow
[William Blake, “London”]
Through caverns measureless to man,
[Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”]
Where thou shalt see the red-gilled fishes leap
[Christopher Marlowe, “The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage”]
And a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws
[Edward Lear, “The Jumblies”]
Where the remote Bermudas ride.
[Andrew Marvell, “Bermudas”]
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me:
[D. H. Lawrence, “Piano”]
This is the cock that crowed in the morn.
[18th c. nursery rhyme, “This is the House That Jack Built”]
Who’ll be the parson?
[18th c. nursery rhyme, “Who Killed Cock Robin?”]
Beppo! That beard of yours becomes you not!
[Lord Byron, “Beppo”]
A gentle answer did the old Man make:
[William Wordsworth, “Resolution and Independence”]
Farewell, ungrateful traitor,
[John Dryden, “Farewell, ungrateful traitor!”]
Bright as a seedsman’s packet
[Edith Sitwell, “Polka”]
Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles.
[Robert Browning, “Love among the Ruins”]
Obscurest night involved the sky
[William Cowper, “The Castaway”]
And brickdust Moll had screamed through half a street:
[Jonathan Swift, “A Description of the Morning”]
“Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been,
[Dante Gabriel Rosetti, “The House of Life: 97. A Superscription”]
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
[John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”]
Every night and alle,
[trad. English folk song, “A Lyke-Wake Dirge”]
The happy highways where I went
[A. E. Housman, “A Shropshire Lad XL”]
To the hills of Chankly Bore!”
[Edward Lear, “The Jumblies”]
Where are you going to, my pretty maid?
[trad. folk song, “Where are you Going My Pretty Maid”]
These lovers fled away into the storm
[John Keats, “The Eve of St. Agnes”]
And it’s O dear, what can the matter be?
[trad. folk song, “O dear, what can the matter be”]
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple bells they say:
[Rudyard Kipling, “Mandalay”]
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
[W. H. Auden, “Lullaby”]
On the wide level of the mountain’s head,
[Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Time, Real and Imaginary”]
Thoughtless as monarch oaks, that shade the plain,
[John Dryden, “Mac Flecknoe”]
In autumn, on the skirts of Bagley Wood.
[Matthew Arnold, “The Scholar-Gypsy”]
A ship is floating in the harbour now,
[Perce Bysshe Shelley, “Epipsychidion”]
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!
[William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”]
—from Wakefulness (New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998). Copyright © 1998 Estate of John Ashbery. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Georges Borchardt. Sources identified by Jeffrey Lependorf, Executive Director of The Flow Chart Foundation.