Mutability

“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