Editor's Choice
Paradise Looked For
We published a poem, ‘Before the Minnows Scattered’, by Cecily Blench in our Issue 28 in January. We also liked this response to Mary Shelley.
Did you know, when writing your gothic tale
Of devastation, anguish and human fallibility
That hundreds of years later the same force,
The same consuming force
Would affect the consciousness of a thousand students,
Lash us on, striving for perfection
In a tract about the will of Dr Frankenstein?
We patch together verbs, nouns and complex clauses,
And attempt to infuse some spark of life in them
With the charge of the language we admire
And hope one day to do justice to.
On the shores of Lake Geneva
Living with your lover
You took up Byron’s challenge
To write a ghostly story
In jest, perhaps, but still in earnest,
And forged a lasting triumph.
Where do I find that motivation?
When I despair of ever finding the right words.
Not between your pages, that is certain!
Not laziness, student procrastination -
Just an ardent desire to write as you did,
With elegance, style and perfect prose
Display my respect and groaning envy
With the only means at my disposal
A bland dissection of linguistic technique
Only to be read and hopefully commended
By greater minds than mine.
Your Prometheus was possessed and inspired,
Feverish with the illicit thrill of bringing life
To an insentient being
Breaking the laws of science, nature and pure morality,
Questing for what he should and could not have.
My quest is legitimate, commissioned, you might say
Our starting points, our ways and means,
Are quite different;
I’ve no wish to pillage a charnel-house, and yet
Both strive to create, to be creator
And so we are the same.
By the Lake, a girl of eighteen
You wrote your ghastly tale
With no assurance of credit at the end.
And here am I, vying for that distinction
But I cannot yet find that spark
To make my creation breathe, its pallid cheeks flush red.
You wrote for years
In that villa, with that man, on the shores of Lake Geneva,
Of a time much like the Fall, when everything changed
And the world was never the same.
There is more to be achieved,
More words to be written and ruminated upon,
In Time, the changing constant.
Meanwhile, before that dreary night of November,
I write this:
My lament to the tragic, overwhelming fate of Victor Frankenstein
And to his creator, a tribute -
To the unsurpassed imagination of Mary Shelley.
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