“Mutability” Introduction

• "Mutability" is English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley's reflection on the power of change. Change is the only thing in the world that doesn't change, the poem suggests, and people get thrown around by their ever-changing feelings like ships on a stormy sea. Shelley first published this poem in his 1816 collection Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude.

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“Mutability” Summary

• People are like clouds covering up the moon at midnight. How swiftly they rush, shine, and tremble, lighting up the night with glowing streaks! But soon enough, night catches up with them, the darkness absorbs them, and they're gone for good.

  People are also like abandoned wind-harps, whose out-of-tune strings make different sounds as different winds hit them. These weak-sided instruments never play the same notes twice.

  We human beings go to bed and find that a nightmare has ruined our restful sleep. We get up and find that a single passing thought can spoil our entire day. We have feelings and thoughts; we laugh or cry; we hug sorrow like an old friend, or throw our troubles out the door.

  But whatever we do, it doesn't matter! Whether we feel joy or misery, our emotion can always leave us in an instant. One day is never, ever like the next: the only lasting thing in the world is Change.

“Mutability” Themes

• 

  Change and Emotion

  Shelley’s “Mutability” argues that, paradoxically, change is the only constant in life—the only part of life that never changes. Human lives, moods, and experiences are all as mutable (that is, changeable) and transitory as clouds on a windy night, and the only thing anyone can be sure of is that “yesterday” will be different from the “morrow.” That’s especially true because people’s lives are so deeply affected by uncontrollable emotions that shift with the breeze. The poem ultimately suggests that change is thus one of the most powerful forces in the world: changeless and eternal itself, it leaves every human being at the mercy of their own endlessly mutable feelings.

  People’s emotions, personalities, and experiences, the speaker argues, all mutate unpredictably from moment to moment. Imagining people as “clouds” that change shape as the wind blows, or as “lyres” (or harps) that play “varying” tunes when breezes strum them, the speaker makes the point that no one stays completely the same from one day to the next: one day’s “laugh[ter]” can always transform into the next day’s “weep[ing].”

  The speaker adds that, alarmingly enough, being changeable also means being vulnerable. There’s no counting on any experience or any feeling for comfort or stability. A normally restful “sleep,” for instance, can be “poison[ed]” by nightmares, and a single “wandering thought,” popping up out of nowhere, can ruin an entire day. Precisely because no feeling ever stays the same, people end up at the mercy of changing emotions that come upon them whether they like it or not—and those emotions can be agonizing. People might sometimes feel they’ve “cast [their] cares away,” for instance, but “woe” (or sorrow) can strike again at any moment.

  If all this is true, the poem argues, then “Mutability”—and especially the mutability of emotions—is perhaps the most “endur[ing],” mighty, and awe-inspiring force in the world. Not only does change shape people’s lives from day to day, it also carries them to an inevitable end, when the dark “night” of death will swallow them up “for ever.” Change, the poem concludes, is the only constant that exists, and it throws all living people around as if they were ships in a storm.

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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Mutability”

• Lines 1-4

  We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
      How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
  Streaking the darkness radiantly!—yet soon
  Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:

  "Mutability" begins with a broad pronouncement: people's lives, the speaker proclaims, are as changeable and fleeting as clouds crossing the face of the moon.

  Take a look at the imagery the speaker uses to deepen this simile:

  We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
  How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
  Streaking the darkness radiantly! [...]

  This vivid description presents the swift course of human lives as a celestial vision. These clouds aren't just speedy and restless, but also beautiful, lit up by the eerie "gleam" of moonlight and making the darkness "radiant[]."

  Notice, too, the sweet /ee/ assonance that threads through these lines, making these "streak[s]" of "speed[ing]," "gleam[ing]" cloud sound as harmoniously beautiful as they look.

  But all this beauty is fleeting and bittersweet. Take a look at the caesura that breaks into this vision in line 3:

  Streaking the darkness radiantly!—|| yet soon
  Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:

  That emphatic break in the middle of the line stresses just how abruptly these clouds—and, by extension, people—can be swallowed up in the eternal dark "night" of death. Life, this poem's speaker imagines, is just a brief, shining vision, "lost for ever" almost as soon as it appears.

  These first lines suggest that this poem is interested in the beauty of passing things—human life included. The fact that these clouds "speed," moving quickly over the moon and into the darkness, only highlights how lovely their gleaming, quivering, radiant forms are. If the clouds weren't fragile and passing, delicate as "veil[s]," they wouldn't be so lovely.

  There's plenty to feel ambivalent about in that thought, however. The rest of this poem will examine both the power and the danger of change.

• Lines 5-8

  Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
      Give various response to each varying blast,
  To whose frail frame no second motion brings
      One mood or modulation like the last.

  

  

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• Lines 9-10

  We rest.—A dream has power to poison sleep;
      We rise.—One wandering thought pollutes the day;

  

  

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• Lines 11-14

  We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep,
  Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:
  It is the same!—For, be it joy or sorrow,
      The path of its departure still is free;

  

  

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• Lines 15-16

  Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
      Nought may endure but Mutability.

  

  

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“Mutability” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Simile

  Similes help the speaker to convey the idea that people and their emotions are constantly changing—and the sense that there's something both beautiful and sad in all that change.

  In the first stanza, the speaker compares people to "clouds that veil the midnight moon." The speaker imagines those clouds "speed[ing]" across the moon's face, seeming to "gleam" (or glow/shine) as they soak up its light, trembling and reshaping themselves as they go. This image introduces the idea of constant change as something awe-inspiringly lovely to see: a quiet, heavenly vision on a moonlit night.

  But mere moments later, the speaker notes that such clouds only shine for the brief moment they're crossing the moon: after that, "night closes round," and they're swallowed up by the darkness. This first simile thus reminds readers that change isn't just part of life: it's also the force that moves every living thing toward the eternal "night" of death.

  The second simile also unites beauty and melancholy. Here, people are "like forgotten lyres"—abandoned harps played only by the wind. Their out-of-tune strings make "dissonant" music as the wind blows this way and that, and the notes they play are never the same twice. Here, the simile suggests that people are essentially helpless in the face of change: passive instruments with no control over what "mood" strikes them next.

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• Metaphor

  

  
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• Imagery

  

  

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• Caesura

  

  

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• Repetition

  

  

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• Paradox

  

  

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• Alliteration

  

  

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• Assonance

  

  

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"Mutability" Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Radiantly
• Lyres
• Dissonant
• Blast
• Frail
• Modulation
• Conceive
• Fond
• Woe
• Ne'er
• Morrow
• Nought
• Mutability

• Luminously—as if the moonlit clouds were glowing.

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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Mutability”

• Form

  "Mutability" doesn't follow any particular form, such as the sonnet or the villanelle. Instead, it simply uses four concise quatrains (four-line stanzas) to make its big philosophical point that change is the only constant.

  This form itself feels pretty constant! With four stanzas of four lines apiece, the poem's structure is as solid and square as a house. For all its images of changing winds and wandering clouds, the poem plants itself firmly on the ground to declare what the speaker believes to be an eternal truth: "Nought may endure but Mutability."

• Meter

  "Mutability" is written in iambic pentameter. That means that each line is built from five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's a perfect example from line 9:

  We rest. | —A dream | has power | to poi- | son sleep;

  (Note that, in Shelley's 19th-century English accent, "power" would have been pronounced as one syllable: pow'r.)

  Iambic pentameter is so common in English-language poetry that readers might take it as a neutral option here, a blank slate that the speaker can use to put philosophy (rather than style) front and center. A lot of spoken English falls naturally into an iambic rhythm, so this meter often feels seamless.

  Iambic pentameter is also pleasantly flexible, allowing the speaker to change up a foot here or there for emphasis. Listen to what happens in the poem's final line, for instance:

  Nought may | endure | but Mu- | tabil- | ity.

  This line begins, not with an iamb, but with its opposite foot: a trochee, which has a DUM-da rhythm. That means the first word here, "Nought" (or "nothing"), gets a little extra punch so that the speaker's voice sounds fervent and serious.

• Rhyme Scheme

  "Mutability" uses a traditional alternating rhyme scheme. Each four-line stanza's pattern runs like this:

  ABAB

  This pattern, like the poem's iambic meter, will feel pretty familiar to a lot of readers: it's one of the most common rhyme schemes in poetry. This poem's speaker seems more interested in communicating an urgent insight than in getting fancy with rhyme and meter.

  Perhaps, though, these regular rhymes also fit in with the poem's big point: the only thing that doesn't change is change itself. The rhymes here are both changing (from A to B and back again) and constant (always in the same pattern)—just like "Mutability."

“Mutability” Speaker

• The poem's speaker doesn't have any clear identity; this poem is less about its speaker than about that speaker's philosophy. However, readers might well interpret the speaker here as Shelley himself, since he often wrote poetry that expressed his own beliefs (both personal and political).

  Perhaps this speaker wouldn't own up to having a single, straightforward character at all. This poem's insistence that "Mutability" is life's only constant suggests that the speaker doesn't feel like a stable, definable sort of person.

“Mutability” Setting

• There's no clear setting in this poem. The speaker sometimes conjures up scenes from nature to make a point—for instance, depicting changeable people as luminous clouds speeding across the face of the moon. But these pictures are only metaphorical: the poem's real setting is the speaker's mind.

  For that matter, though, the speaker might argue that the poem is set in the whole world. To this speaker, "Mutability" is a universal constant, the one thing that stays the same wherever you go.

Literary and Historical Context of “Mutability”

• Literary Context

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was one of a group of 19th-century British writers now known as the Romantics. Alongside notable figures like his wife Mary Shelley (the author of Frankenstein—in which the Creature himself quotes this very poem) and his friend Lord Byron, Shelley helped to transform literature forever.

  Shelley's work, like a lot of Romantic poetry, was concerned with deep feeling, the power of the natural world, and a desire for political and personal freedom. Where earlier Enlightenment-era writers like Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift aspired to elegant phrasings and satirical wit, Shelley and many of his contemporaries preferred to write passionate verse that valued the mysteries and terrors of the imagination over crisp rationality.

  This relatively early poem, which first appeared in Shelley's 1816 collection Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude, is a great example of some classic Romantic tropes. Imagining people as wandering clouds and abandoned lyres, Shelley follows in the footsteps of two of the fathers of English Romanticism: Wordsworth (who famously "wandered lonely as a cloud") and Coleridge (who heard an echo of his own sorrows in an "Aeolian lute"). The radical young Shelley wasn't always too pleased with his forebears, though; he even wrote a dismayed sonnet criticizing Wordsworth's political conservatism.

  Shelley is often associated with Byron (a close friend and sometime collaborator) and Keats (a more distant acquaintance), not just because the three men were all important Romantic poets, but because they all died tragically young. Shelley, with particular drama, drowned in a shipwreck in the Bay of Naples after he insisted on sailing out in a storm. His short life, poetic death, radical convictions, and passionate verse all mean he's remembered as the quintessential Romantic hero, and he remains a beloved and widely-read poet to this day.

  Historical Context

  Shelley published this poem in 1816—a time of much turmoil and "mutability." England at this time was full of rebellious energy: the king, George III, had lost his mind, and the people weren't too pleased to be governed by his dissolute young son the Prince Regent (who would become King George IV after his father finally died in 1820).

  Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution was just beginning to kick into gear. During this time, factory work began to overtake farming as the country's primary form of labor, and cities like London and Manchester became bigger and more powerful as people moved there from the countryside, looking for work. To top it all off, England in 1816 was suffering severe crop failures and famine. Poverty, hunger, and inequality were widespread.

  Shelley, always politically radical, was fascinated by all this upheaval; in fact, he longed for more change, in the form of an economic and social revolution that would address the injustices he saw all around him. (As a pacifist, he always optimistically hoped that such a revolution could come about without bloodshed.) This poem is one of many he wrote in which he seems both exhilarated and overwhelmed by the unstoppable forces of change.

More “Mutability” Resources

• External Resources

  • A Short Biography — Visit the British Library's website to learn more about Shelley's turbulent life.

  • The Poem's Composition — Learn more about the circumstances in which Shelley wrote this poem (and his collaboration with his wife Mary, herself an important writer).

  • The Keats-Shelley Museum — Visit the website of the Keats-Shelley Museum to learn more about Shelley's life and times (and how he fits into the wider Romantic movement).

  • Shelley's Legend — Take a look at an 1889 painting of Shelley's cremation—a dramatic image that reflects Shelley's role as a quintessential Romantic poet.

  • Shelley's Influence — Read biographer Richard Holmes's essay on Shelley's literary legacy.

• LitCharts on Other Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley

  • England in 1819

  • Love’s Philosophy

  • Mont Blanc

  • Music, When Soft Voices Die

  • Ode to the West Wind

  • Ozymandias

  • Song to the Men of England

  • Stanzas Written in Dejection, Near Naples

  • The Question

  • To a Skylark