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
Mary Godwin -- soon to be Shelley --
Writing with Percy, Byron and Polidori
To create the scariest horror story,
Gave life to a monster of immortal glory.
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