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Mary Shelley in Brigantine

By Stephen Dunn b. 1939 Stephen Dunn

Because the ostracized experience the world

in ways peculiar to themselves, often seeing it

clearly yet with such anger and longing

that they sometimes enlarge what they see,

she at first saw Brigantine as a paradise for gulls.

She must be a horseshoe crab washed ashore.

How startling, though, no one knew about her past,

the scandal with Percy, the tragic early deaths,

yet sad that her Frankenstein had become

just a name, like Dracula or Satan, something

that stood for a kind of scariness, good for a laugh.

She found herself welcome everywhere.

People would tell her about Brigantine Castle,

turned into a house of horror. They thought

she'd be pleased that her monster roamed

its dark corridors, making children scream.

They lamented the day it was razed.

Thus Mary Shelley found herself accepted

by those who had no monster in them —

the most frightening people alive, she thought.

Didn't they know Frankenstein had abandoned

his creation, set him loose without guidance

or a name? Didn't they know what it feels like

to be lost, freaky, forever seeking who you are?

She was amazed now that people believed

you could shop for everything you might need.

She loved that in the dunes you could almost hide.

At the computer store she asked an expert

if there was such a thing as too much knowledge,

or going too far? He directed her to a website

where he thought the answers were.

Yet Mary Shelley realized that the pain she felt

all her life was gone. Could her children, dead so young,

be alive somewhere, too? She couldn't know

that only her famous mother had such a chance.

She was almost ready to praise this awful world.

Source: Poetry (September 2001).

Biography

Poet Stephen Dunn was born in 1939 in New York City. The first of his family to go to college, Dunn attended Hofstra University on a basketball scholarship and later worked in advertising. In an interview with Poets and Writers, Dunn discussed the leap from being an ad-man to poet: “My first job out of college was writing in-house brochures for Nabisco in New York, and I kept getting promoted. I was in danger, literally, of . . .

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