These fragments ...

These cautious pencilled scratches, did they start
                    The land of spices; something understood
at school, aware the ‘craft or sullen art’
                    I found myself astray in a dark wood

ran deeper than those subjects learned by rote?
                    When in the chronicle of wasted time    
Instinct or habit, storing lines to quote -
                    Love, all alike, no season knowes, nor clyme

sometimes no more than scraps or single phrase,
                    Bare ruined choirs   …   and now my life is done
a jostling of words; at times, the ways
                   ‘Only the wasteful virtues earn the sun’

a sonnet finds itself  -  the turning mind
                   So various, so beautiful, so new
searching the ‘not untrue and not unkind’;
                   A way of life, a way of getting through.

those half-forgotten half-remembered lines
                   What did I know, what did I know
shored against ruins and blind Fate’s designs.    
                   Time will say nothing but I told you so.

D A Prince
(Using lines  and half-lines by George Herbert, Dante, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Chidiock Tichborne, W.B. Yeats, Matthew Arnold, James Brockway, Robert Hayden, W.H. Auden.)
 
If you have any thoughts on this poem, D A Prince would be pleased to hear them.