Predator Or Prey Poem by gershon hepner

PREDATOR OR PREY


While nuzzling at raw flesh like shoals of feral fish
the critics ask if Shelley was a predator
or prey.
The verdict can’t be made by any editor,
since, silenced, victims cannot say what they may wish
to say.

Inspired by a review of two books on Shelley in the Sunday Observer, July 1,2007, “Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle, ” by Janet Todd and “Being Shelley: The Poet's Search for Himself, ” by Ann Wroe Cape:

Wroe ends her book with a macabre image of the drowned poet under water, is skin puckering, limbs swelling and thighbones protruding as marauding fishes nuzzle at his flesh 'like reviewers massing for the kill'. Reviewers of one sort or another have picked his bones ever since but, if posterity till can't decide whether Shelley was primarily predator or prey, his victims seem to have been in no doubt. Both Harriet and Fanny loved him to the end, while Mary, who suffered longer and perhaps more deeply than either from his depredations and betrayals, came to see him posthumously as angelic. Being Shelley suggests why. It traces the movement of his mind -soaring, scudding, dipping, floating, racing like flames or wind or waves -with exhilarating assurance, precision and panache.

6/19/08