That summer, the year without a summer,
ungenial downpours kept them inside.
It was Lord Byron’s thought to pass the time
by writing tales, the lakeside villa steeped
in silence as their conceptions swelled.
Polidori confessed the stubbornness of his pen,
he had a notion, but it would not come right:
The Vampyre, loath to creep into the light.
While the poets scribbled yarns of phantoms,
Mary Godwin first dreamed of the monster,
a thing that would only briefly be hers,
before the waking dream of babies dying
and the black dog that chased Shelley away
long before he drowned; his funeral pyre
burning at dawn on the shores of the Med
like a poet’s Valhalla, Byron said.
Amongst her secrets, a lifetime later,
were snips of baby hair, and his heart’s ash.
The brain that laboured Frankenstein also
spawned the tumour that dogged her final years;
people, money, words, all slipped through her hands.
She devoted herself to the child that lived,
heir to Shelley’s title and estate though
his rich genius was spent long ago.
She dreamt of icy wastes, where the monster
fled and happiness was of no concern.
It also had the heart of someone else
and found life salt; proof by her example
that the spark of the miraculous
can be found in the voices of the dead,
in remembering, in guilt, in love;
all the parts of others we are made of.
