Mutability (poem)

"Mutability" is a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley which appeared in the 1816 collection Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude: And Other Poems. Half of the poem is quoted in his wife Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein although his authorship is not acknowledged. She is credited as the author of the lines. There is also a prose version of the same themes of the poem in Frankenstein.

The eight lines from the poem "Mutability" which are quoted in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) occur in the scene in Chapter 10 when Victor Frankenstein climbs Glacier Montanvert in the Swiss Alps and encounters the Being:

"We rest. -- A dream has power to poison sleep;

We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;

It is the same! For, be it joy or sorrow,

Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;

The monster also quotes a line from the poem in Chapter 15 of Frankenstein. The monster says: "'The path of my departure was free;' and there was none to lament my annihilation."

The poem first appeared in the 1816 collection Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude: And Other Poems, published by Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy in London:

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;

Streaking the darkness radiantly!—yet soon

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings

To whose frail frame no second motion brings

We rest.—A dream has power to poison sleep;

We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;

It is the same!—For, be it joy or sorrow,

Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;

The poem consists of four quatrains in abab iambic pentameter. A series of symbols, clouds, wind harps, describe the permanence in impermanence. The themes of transformation and metamorphosis and the transitory and ephemeral nature of human life and the works of mankind were also addressed in "Ozymandias" (1818) and "The Cloud" (1820).

The first two stanzas concern the bustle and hurry of life which only conceals its inherent transience. Human lives are as vaporous as clouds or untuned lyres that, discarded, have become like an Aeolian harp that is susceptible to every passing wind gust.

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