Poetry Corner

Mutability 

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 forever:

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.

We rest.--A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise.--One wandering thought pollutes the day;
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:
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability. 

- Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822)

Shelley was, briefly, an undergraduate at University College, before being sent down following the publication of his pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism. He was, too, the husband of Mary Shelley, and made notable edits to her manuscript of Frankenstein.

Today, 8th July, is the 193rd anniversary of his death. This lends an extra edge of poignancy to a poem dealing with transience – Shelley was not quite thirty when he died. (His memorial statue in University College, draped like The Pietà, is incredibly moving – the young man is laid in his private niche in a quiet quad of the college.) Nothing, Shelley says, endures except non-endurance. Even with this essential knowledge, he cannot have predicted his own early death, drowned in a sudden storm while sailing his boat, the Don Juan. But Shelley has achieved a permanence in his poetry which outlives him.

We’ll be reading a selection of Shelley’s poems in a hour-long lunchtime seminar this week at 1pm on Thursday; we’ll meet in the Chancel (not the Old Library as usual). All are welcome to attend.