Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), one of the ‘Big Six’ Romantic poets, the others being Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth, Byron and Keats.

Romantic Poetry

A tenet of Romantic poetry is its focus on nature and man’s insignificance in comparison to the natural world. This was a subject of particular interest to the poet Wordsworth. Shelley, however, was concerned with regeneration of his spiritual and poetic self, and regeneration of Europe politically. It was a turbulent time when the Napoleonic Wars had not long ended and Europe was in a state of flux and unrest. In England the infamous Peterloo Massacre had occurred in August 1819, when cavalry charged into a crowd demonstrating against poor economic conditions and lack of parliamentary representation in the north of England.

Mutability

Comparing the constant change of nature to human behaviour and emotions, this poem conveys ideas that are quite different to Shelley’s Mutability II–The only thing that does not change is the constant change itself, which is relevant to nature, and especially humans.

The poem invokes the Greek Philosopher, Heraclitus, who propounded the view that everything in the world is in constant flux — in other words ‘mutable’. The annotation of the final line of the poem explains this concept.

Structure

This poem has four quatrains and is written with a perfect ABAB rhyming pattern.–unlike Mutability II, where every other line is cut short to symbolize unexpected disappointment.

The metre is broadly iambic pentameter, that is five metrical feet or iambs per line, each foot comprising one unstressed and one stressed syllable. This pattern creates an elegant, flowing rhythm suitable for the subject.

Language and Imagery

The voice is that of the poet, a first person narrator addressing a second person plural ‘we’. This gives a sense of intimacy, inclusiveness, so the reader identifies with what the poet is saying, and yet a sense of breadth and universality. Shelley evokes the cosmos in this and many of his poems; here ‘clouds’, ‘moon’, ‘night’. He often capitalises these nouns to suggest the spirit or abstract force behind the phenomena, but here, it is only Mutability that has the capital letter..

Wordsworth also wrote a sonnet of the same title.