Mutability

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1816

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context

“Mutability” is a part of the English Romantic tradition as it presents people in a volatile fashion. Romantics zeroed in on the human condition and its stormy characteristics. Countering the Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason, which dominated in the late 1700s, the Romantics opposed the idea that people were generally stable, rational creatures. Romantics saw humans as dynamic as their environments and often drew comparisons between humans and nature to highlight their unstable qualities. The first comparison Shelley makes in “Mutability” is to clouds, and he enlarges the nature imagery with a moon.

If Enlightenment thinkers thought humans were at the center of the world and could exercise a fair amount of control over their fate, Romantics thought a person’s fate was unknowable. The world was unpredictable, and no human could foretell the outcome of their life. Romantics knocked humans down a peg and put them in a subservient position. In “Mutability,” humans are powerless and regularly fail to hold on to a thought or an emotion. What endures isn’t solid human wisdom or feeling but mutability. Change sits at the top of the hierarchy and influences all aspects of human life. Aside from “Mutability,” the supremacy of change manifests in many important Romantic texts, from Lord Byron’s rambunctious epic poem Don Juan (1819) to John Keats’s 1817 letter on “Negative Capability.”

Authorial Context

Separate from the Romantic movement, Shelley’s biography highlights the impact of mutability. In the context of Shelley’s life, mutability seems less like a given and more like a condition he intentionally sought. He opposed his wealthy parents and rebelled against their predictable life. His cultivation of mutability manifests in his support for revolutions and wholesale changes throughout society. It also reflects his turbulent romantic life with Harriet Westbrook and Mary Shelley. He abandoned the former for the latter and then likely cheated on Mary. In Being Shelley, Ann Wroe writes, “To settle was to be ‘tamed,’ ‘benumbed,’ or ‘tranquilized’” (55). Shelley couldn’t stick with his socioeconomic class or one romantic partner because it countered mutability.

Ann Wroe describes Shelley’s infatuation with transitory elements like fire and water. About the sea, Wroe says that Shelley “spent all possible hours either on it or beside it, watching with passion each move and every change” (112). Yet Shelley wasn’t born one of the “clouds that veil the midnight moon” (Line 1) or one of the “forgotten lyres” (Line 5). In the context of Shelley’s life, mutability “may endure” (Line 16) because he let it. He consciously chose the transitory over the stable. Then again, it’s possible to argue that predictability is an illusion. Shelley’s life wasn’t an example of privileged rebellion but the triumph of inevitable mutability. As steadiness is a construct, Shelley’s life symbolizes the true rollicking underbelly of humanity.