Two Hearts Beating

Mary and Percy Shelley: A Love Poem

When Robert was kind enough to become my first paid subscriber I wanted to return the favor in poem.

I asked him if there was anything he’d like a poem about, and he told me a beautifully tragic story about Mary Shelley carrying her husband Percy’s petrified heart.

He had me there and then. Then he told me of his hope to visit her grave on a rainy day, and it was such a stunning thought I had to add it in.

The poem below is for him, for them, and for all dark lovers everywhere. And do subscribe to Robert, friends, he has many more beautiful stories to tell.

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Two Hearts Beating

You cannot make a monster
if you do not love a man.
If you can’t taste the lost embrace
of familiar flesh and deep regret,
you do not delve into those
dark and tragic depths.
No, one must know the
pangs and pains of being left.

Mary met him when she was young,
love hardly a thought upon her tongue.
A girl of only sixteen, she ran away,
ran wild with another woman’s dream,
caused a scandal in that day’s scene.

Percy seduced her upon a tomb,
his philosophies, his words, her ruin.
They escaped through stormy seas,
somehow unscathed, only to drown
within each other, as if fated.

Percy never knew God,
but he knew Mary well.
Her every vice, her quiet glory,
her broken body, her unwritten stories,
her opium drunk lies, her grey green eyes,
the sadness that seeped into her sleep
and made beauty from what creeps.

Mary was there as Percy’s first wife died,
ostracized after her clear suicide.
Harriet drowned and took with her a child,
two casualties of a love gone wild.
Two lovers once feral and free,
exiled together in infamy.

Through money pains and social dread,
their love for words made them a bed.
Percy was there for that nightmare,
when Frankenstein first stared
into her eyes and Mary dared look back.
He was there for the highs and lows,
the children lost, the acclaim gained,
there as Mary Shelley became a name,
her man-made monster chased by fame.

For greatness always came cost,
every beautiful day marred with loss,
and after losing child after child,
the last cost was her final trial.
Percy would be the one to go,
a one-way trip to lifelong woe.

He drowned, a hopeless drunk.
An inner storm, a boat sunk,
her lover lost, his body cremated.
Mary deadened, devastated,
but Percy’s heart resisted
that last and final fire.
Her love had one last desire:

To be with Mary still,
his untold promise,
an unwritten will.
And so in wine he was preserved,
a piece remained, always with her.

Mary kept his heart
as if it was part of her,
because, in truth,
it was the start of her.
She had drowned every tear
in Percy’s bottomless well,
had written every last word
under the unsung poet’s spell.

To live without him that,
for her, was walking hell.
She kept him closer than most,
beating beside her, heart in hand,
her living ghost.

She wrapped Percy in poetry,
placed him within her desk,
a devotion gloriously grotesque.

And when Mary was finally laid to rest,
there were two hearts beating in her chest,
hers and his, forever intertwined,
a love withstanding tests of time.

So lay your head upon her grave
and listen close for not one,
but two thumps in perfect sync,
a love written in song and ink.

Let the rains pour down
and kiss your head
as you rest upon
their last shared bed.