From A Poet's Lips Lies Crept Poem by SJ. Sharkey

From POV of Harriet Westbrook, first wife of renowned poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who drowned herself.
Soon after, Shelley married Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who penned Frankenstein under her married name.
Years later, Shelley died by drowning.

My poem is in response to Shelley's On A Poet's Lips I Slept, from Prometheus Unbound.


On a poet's lips I slept
Dreaming like a love-adept
In the sound his breathing kept;
Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,
But feeds on the aerial kisses
Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses.
He will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake-reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom,
Nor heed nor see what things they be;
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality!
One of these awakened me,
And I sped to succour thee.