I was a poor, helpless, miserable wretch
With telling artistic assurance Mary Shelley has the Creature, who up to
this point has referred to himself only by personal pronouns, name himself
with the same word originally used by Victor, "wretch" (1.4.1). Here, however, he defines himself
as what King Lear calls "the thing itself . . . unaccommodated man" (III.iv.100). Perhaps, indeed,
Mary Shelley means us to hear in the insistent repetition of the word
"wretch" the memorable accents of that unsceptered, sorrowing monarch:
Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.
-- III.iv.28-36
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