Spectator competition winners: patchwork poetry

In Competition No. 3164 you were invited to submit a poem in which each line comes from a different well-known poem.

The cento form — the stitching together of lines from existing poems — is an ancient one, around since at least the days of Virgil and Homer. ‘Cento Nuptialis’, by the Roman poet and teacher Decimus Magnus Ausonius, is a whopping 131-liner, composed of lines, or half-lines, from Virgil’s Aeneid, Georgics and Eclogue.

You were required to cobble together a mere 16 lines (or fewer if you chose), but the challenge, obviously, was to avoid sliding into nonsense. It was an accomplished entry — many of you chose to mine the same poetic seams — and once again, there was a welcome sprinkling of new names among the regulars.

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Commendations go to Philip Roe, Avril Bradley, Jayne Osborn, Nick Syrett, Maggie McLean and Georgia Faloone.