"Mary Wollstonecraft Revisted" by Zeb Crider
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Student project: "Mary Wollstonecraft Revisted". Copyright 2007 Zeb Crider.
In the beginning was Mary Wollstonecraft
Born to a family that didn’t bother
To show any affection other
Than a mother beaten by a father
She was raised in a place called England
A horrid eighteenth century nation
Which did not provide proper schooling
But that didn’t impede her education
Her sister fell victim to marriage
A system that traps women and sticks
Them permanently to men by law,
But Mary freed Bess from her bad fix
She had big ideas on education
Which were hitherto unseen
Mary dared to teach students to think
In her school at Newington Green
She hung out with Dr.’s Price and Johnson
More theorists with their political talkings
At the day’s progressive salons
Intellectually clad in Blue Stockings
Her closest friend became deathly ill
Went to Lisbon and married a stud
But he only wanted to make an heir
And Mar y lost her dear Fanny Blood
She consorted with William Blake
A writer with an illiterate wife
He wrote Mary into his Albionpoem
And illustrated her Stories from Real Life
Original Stories narrates a governess
Telling tales of gloom and fear
To her impressionable young charges
Acting as Messiah or puppeteer
Mary based the book on experience
From her time in the land of potatoes
She had been working there in Ireland
As governess for the Kingsboroughs
Mary took issue with a man named Burke
And disagreed with him on so much that when
She read Reflections on the French Revolution
She attacked him through Vindication of Men
Mary was distraught by patriarchal states
Of the rights of citizens, women lacked a few
So she gained fame by penning her
Vindication of Woman in ninety-two.
Mary then found love in Paris
In the form of a rugged frontiersman
But her affections would be short lived
With Gilbert Imlay the American
The French Revolution was in full swing
With guillotine deaths every day
So Mary decided to have a baby
And gave birth mid-Terror to Fanny Imlay
Then Mary got a frigid assignment
From her unloving lover, and so
She scoured Scandinavia to find
The Silver Ship at the end of the rainbow
Thus her relationship did fail
With a man who was all bite and no bark
But the voyage allowed Mary to write
Her Letters from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
The trip gave Mary a bit of peace
But it was also mixed with despair
She resolved to take her own life
With not one suicide attempt, but a pair
The overdose attempt was truly admirable
But Mary couldn’t keep the laudanum down
So she tried to dig a watery grave
But the Thames wouldn’t let her drown
Mary rebounded and fell in love once more
With William Godwin the ‘politically just’
And this time around Mary expired
Before the marriage had time to rust
She had some problems with childbirth
Although she delivered none the less
But where the overdose and drowning had failed to kill her
Sepsis was a raging success
Godwin succinctly mourned her death
With a total of three blank bars
Then set to work on scandalizing her
And two months later he published Memoirs
Mary’s legacy did survive her death
Through many ladies with greatness in store
Mary Shelley and Fanny Imlay to name a few
Claire Clairmont and Margaret King to name a few more
Mary’s successors overcame her short comings
And successfully reenacted her death wishes
First Fanny was burned by laudanum
Then Harriet Shelley went to sleep with the fishes
But on a more respectful note
Mary Wollstonecraft’s legacy did live on
Her philosophies had great impact
And her feminism caused a new age to dawn
So let us remember the great life
Of she who loved and laughed
We should all raise our glasses and shout
“Three cheers for Mary Wollstonecraft”
Copyright 2012,
by the Contributing Authors.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons License
Cite/attribute Resource.
Crider, Z. (2007, November 07). \'Mary Wollstonecraft Revisted\' by Zeb Crider. Retrieved February 12, 2012, from Notre Dame OpenCourseWare Web site: http://ocw.nd.edu/political-science/mary-wollstonecraft-and-mary-shelley/talent-show-text/mary-wollstonecraft-revisted-by-zeb-crider.
