A cento is a poem assembled entirely from lines taken from other works. The name is Latin for a patchwork garment — cloth cut from many sources, sewn into something new. The form is genuinely ancient: Ausonius compiled one from Virgil in the fourth century; Falconia Betitia Proba rewrote the life of Christ entirely in Virgilian lines. The rules are simple. Every line must be verbatim. Nothing is invented.
This generator makes centos from randomly selected contemporary song lyrics. Songs are already verse; their lines already scan and breathe and turn. Pulled from their melodies, they become stranger and sometimes more interesting than they were. Click any line in the poem to swap it for another from the same source. The attributions are below.
Lines are drawn from whichever songs the source returns at the moment you generate. The same button pressed twice will produce a different poem. Non-English lines are kept as they arrive: a cento should surprise you.
On the cento
The classical cento came with a set of tacit rules: lines must be complete, they must be verbatim, and the seams where one source meets another should ideally be invisible. The ideal cento reads as if it were written that way. Ausonius, who composed a wedding poem assembled entirely from Virgil, included an apology in his preface for the impudence of the exercise — though he was clearly rather pleased with it.
The form fell out of fashion with Romanticism and its emphasis on original expression. It is hard to claim lyric sincerity when your poem is, literally, someone else's words. But it has had quiet revivals in the 20th century, particularly through Oulipo and the various conceptual writing movements that followed, which saw constraint as generative rather than limiting.
Song lyrics make useful raw material because they are already structured as verse: they have line breaks, rhythmic pulse, and a tendency toward compressed or imagistic language. They are also written to be memorable, which means individual lines carry more weight than the average prose sentence. Remove them from their melody and place them beside lines from entirely different songs, and you discover how much interpretive work the music was doing on their behalf.