BBCento

Just when you think the BBC's massive sense of its own importance and sheer wonderfulness couldn't get any more massive, along comes the latest jaw-droppingly self-congratulatory trailer for the supposed wonders of BBC2's output. Watch it here, if you can stand it...The verbal content of this shameless waste of licence fee payers' money might sound to the casual listener like so much windy 'inspirational' verbiage in the spirit of the Olympics opening ceremony - and a crime against John Keats and various other poets - but it is of some formal interest as a rare modern example of the verse form known as a cento. This is a patchwork of very short unrelated fragments from the works of one or more poets, stitched together into some kind of whole. At one time centos were often assembled from fragments of Virgil, sometimes to demonstrate the poet's unwitting foreshadowing of the Gospel story. The content of the BBC2 cento, stitched by one Alison Chisolm, is detailed here. Poor old Walter Savage Landor contributes two words of Alison Chisolm's 13, and Arthur O'Shaughnessy is, er, generously represented. But let us return to Keats and remind ourselves of that great sonnet - great enough to shrug off whatever violence is done to it...

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer Much have I traveled in the realms of gold And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet never did I breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific—and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien.