releases his mind.
untethered & passionate.
creativity becomes creation
but creativity is lost.
make something human and then take away humanity.
you are humanity & you are in isolation.
and your work is burning alive.
you lit the fire but refuse to admit it.
some of the words survive
crumpled seared pages stuffed
in jacket pockets
the writer cannot take off the coat.
the writer is too cold to burn alive
but does it anyway.
In this poem, I focus on Victor but portray him as a writer instead of as a creator of new life. I was partly inspired in this poem by our romantic poetry unit and the corresponding idea of the writer or poet as the creator of something outside of the self. I also thought that it would be an interesting way to describe Victor’s situation, since the stakes of creating new life are so much higher than the creation of a piece of writing. Victor doesn’t seem to realize this and the responsibility that must come with his creation, and completely ignores and detests the monster for a long time after the night of the monster’s birth; he treats this living thing as a piece of bad poetry that gets closed inside a notebook and never revised. The living thing must then go off on its own without anyone to turn to and without any initial knowledge of the world around him; he also knows that he is hated by both his creation and anyone who lays eyes on him. I illustrate this through the end of the first stanza. I am talking about Victor throughout the entire poem, and the line “make something human and then take away humanity” reveals how Victor seems to be the monster’s only connection to humans like Victor. The monster seemingly has human emotion and knowledge but cannot put that to good use and associate with humans in any positive way since everyone is fearful of him. I also use the imagery of fire in the following lines to show how the monster’s character slowly becomes worse and worse and how he becomes so envious and hateful of humanity that he resorts to murder. After murdering the child William, the monster says, “I gazed upon my victim, and my heart swelled with exultation and hellish triumph: clapping my hands, I exclaimed, ‘I too, can create desolation…’” (Shelley 105). The imagery of fire also connects to the themes of hell and Satan present within my second poem (project 2/3), along with the monster’s descent into a more Satan-like figure through Victor’s neglect.
The rest of this poem goes over Victor’s connection to his creation, even though he does not feel like he should be connected at all. The monster follows him throughout the story, and after Victor destroys his progress on creating a mate for the monster, he promises that he will take revenge. The story ends with the monster standing over Victor’s body, and even though he did not directly murder Victor, he followed him until the end of his life. The imagery of fire was also used for Victor here, to connect them more clearly throughout the poem and show how Victor was dragged downward by both his actions and the monster’s. I go back to the idea of Victor as a writer in the second half, suggesting that what could have originally come out of Victor’s creation of new life did not occur; if Victor had been able to look ahead to what would happen after life occurred or if he had acted differently towards that life, the monster might not have contributed to his downfall. As I write in the second stanza, some parts of the original idea still survive but nothing positive does. Victor is trapped in the burning coat with the remnants of his “writings”, or the monster's character and beginning sense of wonder for the world, and in the end he metaphorically burns himself alive. The contrast of imagery in the last two lines also represent the setting in which his life ended, with the ice surrounding him on all sides.