the male Medusa took you in a phase
and turned you into his carapace
after floating in the sea several days
he returned to you without a face
of all the monstrous forms of mankind
he had masked horror you could galvanise
from myths and body parts combined -
he thought your nipples opened and had eyes
which noticed each bolt and ligature
when Psyche got to see her Cupid -
of the women unmade for literature
and for that Lamia grown tumid
in his pocket - you alone were spared
to lock up his heart some ash and hair
Waterstone’s
Oxford
4 September 2018
Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was the daughter of the philosopher William Godwin and the feminist Mary Wollstonecroft. She was the author of ” Frankenstein, or The New Prometheus” (1818) and the wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822).
I refer to the Cupid and Psyche story in Apuleius’ ” Metamorphoses” better known as ” The Golden Ass”, and to the poem by John Keats (1795-1821) ” Lamia”, a copy of which was found in Shelley’s pocket when his body was discovered, washed up after drowning in the Gulf of Spezia.
A Lamia was a nursery bogey in ancient Greece; - in Keats’ version, a melusine half-serpent half-woman. P.B. Shelley did experience the hallucination described here, and when Mary Shelley’s desk was opened on the first anniversary of her death in 1852, it was found to contain what is alleged to be Shelley’s heart ( his liver is another contender), ash from his cremation, and locks of his hair, which I have seen myself at the Bodleian Library. His hair was walnut coloured.
Why do I use the word ” unmade” ? I won’t affirm the traditional use of the word ” undone”, and I wanted the homonym. Moreover Victor Frankenstein destroyed the female he was making in Scotland as a companion for his creation.