as the monster in the burning lake.
you as the monster in the mountains
that are eating you whole.
the limbs of your companion fall into the sea
& catch on fire.
your creator as a god
with his hands tied behind his back.
mind being taken over by the thought of life
& then shutting
down
when that life comes to be.
this is what comes from obsession.
& finally. you.
as a hated adam
who wouldn’t have needed an eve
if your god had been beside you
in this story there is hatred
& satan is never there in the beginning
only the end.
This poem is about the monster in Frankenstein. There are a lot of references to Satan and other characters within Paradise Lost, so I wanted to bring that into this poem and connect Milton’s characters to the main figures within Frankenstein. When the monster first reads Paradise Lost, he realizes that his situation should be very similar to Adam’s, with him being the only one created of his kind, but that unlike Adam, he is deserted by his creator and doesn’t have a happy and blissful life. The monster states, “Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition; for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, a bitter envy rose within me” (Shelley 95). I wanted to connect the monster to both Adam and Satan, arguing that he doesn’t become like Satan from the very beginning of the book, even though he might be regarded as such by Victor and other humans who are fearful of him. The ending lines of my poem best show this, with the line “in this story there is hatred” showing how the monster starts to act with more and more malice towards his creator as the story continues, especially with Victor’s destruction of his possible female mate; the story also partly ends with the murder of Elizabeth before she marries Victor, mirroring Satan’s destruction of Adam and Eve after feeling a lot of hatred and envy towards them for having a happy life.
I also wanted to bring in Victor as having the role of God, and even though in Paradise Lost his “children” are Adam and Eve, in this story the monster is his child. My imagery in the second stanza is a way to show how Victor seemed to be trapped or drawn in too far by the process of his creation, and unable to accept that he has responsibility over his creation once the process is done. The lines “your creator as a god / with his hands tied behind his back” juxtapose with the actual process of creation mentioned in Frankenstein, which has very heavy use of the hands in putting the body together; I wanted to do this to further show how trapped within himself he actually is even though he doesn’t realize it. He thinks that his hands are helpful to him and that they are allowing him to create a new and wondrous life form, but again he is not prepared for what he actually creates and therefore becomes imprisoned within the obsessiveness of his “creative” process. Also, when he first creates the monster, Victor recalls, “He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped and rushed down stairs” (Shelley 38-39). In this moment, hands become something threatening to him, which again goes against the positive and powerful way he thinks he uses his hands throughout the creation of the monster that now threatens him.