Best Shelley Poems
Shelley
(The Birth of Science Fiction)
I.
Young Shelley at Eton imbibed the mystique
Of science romanticized into extremes:
He gave his poor tutor a shock and a shriek—
Electric jolt!—eliciting screams.
II.
Explosives and fire-balloons were his joy,
Chemicals tainting his fingers and arms,
Steam engine blew-up—(another mere toy).
Mad Shelley continually causing alarms
III.
His tutor named Walker is wholly forgot—
Blueprint for someone whose name we’ve all read—
Frankenstein’s prototype, likely as not,
Mixed up with Shelley in wife Mary’s head.
Shelley—Romantic Visionary
Maestro-Romanticus-Supremus
Percy Bysshe Shelley
One Heaven, One Hell
Promise of a later birth.
About a little soul
Epipsychidion
One immortality, one annihilation
Wilderness of this Elysian earth.
Gary Bateman, Copyright © All Rights Reserved,
August 5, 2015 (Double Dactyl)
Mary Shelley was born to a woman’s rights advocate.
Her mother Mary Wollstonecraft died when Mary was two weeks old.
Her father raised her to be independent like her mother.
This was in the early 1800’s, so an odd practice at this time.
Mary fell in love with a married poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley.
His wife committed suicide when Mary got pregnant by him.
Mary Shelley edited and promoted her husband’s works.
Two of their three children died at young ages, and Percy drowned.
Mary wrote The Modern Prometheus in 1818.
One of the first recognized works of science fiction.
You might recognize it better by its other name.
Frankenstein
Which she penned when she was eighteen years old.
My inner dialogue speaks to me.
Like music, it inspires my creativity.
One hundred words swirling in my mind.
It makes me dizzy, as I try to unwind.
Will my name go down in history?
Along with Frost, Poe & Shelley?
They are my masters of the verse.
Prose is my passion & pain is my curse.
My best friend Moved Away
Shelley Sjolseth moved away
My best friend with eyes blue gray
Had a crazy basement house
Sneaked as quiet as a mouse
Shelley played the games I like
Hiked and had a shiny bike
Shelley, Shelley, miss you so
Where in this big world did you go?
Shelley the cockatoo went to the zoo
She made a lot of new friends
When Shelley got home
she roared like a lion
She snored like a bear
She fell asleep in her favorite chair
She smiled as she slept
Many memories to be kept
The lion the bears the monkeys
and giraffes
Will wait until next time for many more laughs
I heard a poem by Shelley,
I heard it on the telly;
a sweet reminisce
about one missed kiss;
my knees just turned to jelly.
At eighty-seven well past my prime
Can you believe it no long can rhyme
Even Shelly and Keats
Have hung up their cleats
Each had hoped for a life more sublime
Hardly in her dotage, Mary Shelley was only nineteen
when she composed the character/monster, Frankenstein.
I could connect the dots of many a tragic scene,
but we’d be here all night, I must streamline.
She eloped at seventeen with the poet P.B. Shelley,
Mary’s step sister introduced them to her lover, Lord Byron.
The two poets formed a friendship with a Dr. Polidori.
and nightly trialogues of morbid corpses began.
Listening intently, Mary absorbs what the men expound,
Lord Byron proposed that they each write a ghost story.
Mary’s contribution was to become the most renowned -
In 1818, the world first read of Frankenstein’s laboratory.
Within six years of that infamous meeting of minds
all three men had departed from this earth’s pod.
The two sisters survive as my brief telling unwinds
declaring the danger of men daring to “play God.”
August 7, 2021
Sponsor Kim Rodrigues
Contest Name Dot to Dot
a dot to dot based on age and eight years in the life of Mary Shelley
Here is someone who is worthy of all the grace,
Let me describe his glory before his name gets erased,
The Pharaoh Ozymandias of Egypt,
Who was even worthy of Shelley's praise.
He has done a lot I feel,
Even though I cannot see his real reel,
I am sure he was praised well,
Even by the worthy poet for that- I can tell.
He might not be alive now,
Nor even the graceful poet - You know how,
But then he is made immortal,
By the poet who made others in front of him appear Mortal!
Spans (Inspired by Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias")
If one pursues the desert, smooth and vast,
They will not glimpse the history buried there.
The monuments constructed did not last,
Save by poet’s pen upon paper.
A fixèd mast protruding from the spans;
The endless stream of time will wear all down,
Like flowing sand within an hourglass,
For colors mix inexorably to brown.
So irony has come with human life,
The closed events that circle round and round,
As goes delight to sadness, joy to strife
And all of history lost to passing’s glare,
Emotion, insight, love, belief, despair,
Forever locked in rock’s unyielding care.
Take the dead;
use their parts
to make a wretch,
this morbid art—
Frankenstein, Frankenstein!
You are to blame
for the deadness
in your heart.
Great scientists
applaud you,
what— because you
play a god!
Frankenstein, Frankenstein!
Broad paths
are better
left untrod.
Look in the mirror;
See the true beast!
You are the nightmare
stealing your sleep!
Oh, Frankenstein;
The self is the
monster that haunts
you—haunts me.
Written: January 6th, 2025, for contest sponsored by Andrea Dietrich
***********
Mary Shelley stitched storms into her stories,
then wondered why her creatures had worries!
If she lived now, she’d reboot her monster—
and give it Wi-Fi to haunt her.
**Mary Shelley—a novelist, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein.
SHELLEY Poetical Essay
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Poet Percy Bysshe Shelleyys
a bit of a rebel was he
A tragic bio truth to tell
drowning in his boat 'Ariel'