Mary and Polidori

Kenneth Vincent Walker

O Polidori, Polidori

What is your story?

On the shores of Lake

Geneva amidst a storm

Like no other; the wrath

Of Hades lights the sky

Above the Villa Diodati

Besieged by cannonballs

Of thunder as Lord Byron

Poses a challenge to his

Illustrious guests to write

Of horror, a ghost story,

Within three days or less.

Its participants were: The

Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley,

And Mary Wollstonecraft

Godwin, the respectable

Physician Dr. Polidori and

Of course host Lord Byron.

It’s not known what Byron

Wrote and Shelley wrote

Merely short “Fragments

Of a Ghost Story;” Perhaps

Wine laced with laudanum

Dashed all hopes of glory.

Mary penned “Frankenstein;

A Modern Prometheus” and

The precursor to “Dracula,” a

Gothic novel by Bram Stoker,

Was Polidori’s “The Vampyre.”

Thus, the unlikely two made

Horror history with their stories.