Percy Shelley's "Mutability"

Having ended our class section on the Shelley’s, and now well into Wuthering Heights, I’ve been hit with an unexpected nostalgia, an emphatic longing for Mary and Percy Shelley’s profound imagination, keen philosophical insight, and poetic creativity. In my blog, I refrained from commenting on Frankenstein perhaps out of fear for my safety. Class debates were too heated. Some believed the novel belonged in the Western Canon along with the Bible; others believed reading the novel was a form of cruel and unusual punishment. Despite this, as a class, we seemed to share a rightful affinity for Percy Shelley’s “Mutability.” I, too, loved the poem’s skillful use of imagery, somber and musing tone, clever diction, and its quintessential Romantic sensibility. But its philosophical message? Not so much.

According to the poem, the only constant that humans can rely on is change and cyclicality. Lines 9-12 uncover the disadvantages of this type of existence, but the last stanza, especially the last three lines, strikes a positive chord: “The path of its departure still is free:/Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;/Nought may endure but Mutability.” Seeing no other option, one may find consolation in the idea that there will always be another day, whether it is in the individual’s immediate lifetime or in the future. But for Shelley, this constant moving teaches humankind about its possible futility or unimportance, perhaps anticipating an eye-opening point in Darwin’s Theory of Evolution; that is—humans are not the apex of evolution. It may also help humankind escape, as Shelley poignantly writes in the “Defense of Poetry,” “the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions.”

For me, mutability is monstrous and monotonous, forcing the individual human mind into a bland, cyclical prison. Even worse, mutability is a contradiction within itself. To put more or less simply, mutability is not mutable—it’s fixed and permanent. From endless sunsets and sunrises, myriad human life spans, measureless viruses, ceaseless social and economic changes, idea after tedious philosophical idea to countless, beautiful cosmic explosions, everything seems open-ended, not heading towards a meaningful end purpose. Luckily, I think my and Shelley’s conception of mutability is mistaken.

With a feline-like curiosity, I had always wondered why the short, imperative sentence, “Read Kant” was listed high in a self-help, how-to-be-happy checklist posted on the Internet by an unknown blogger. This was before my reading of Kant, of course. At present, I’m reading Kant’s Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics. And fortunately, his view of time within this text has shattered my preconceived notion of mutability. Human perception of change is no different from our perception of time. According to Kant, we see space and time only as appearances, not as they are in themselves. In this view, time does not refer to any kind of entity that "flows," that objects "move through," or that is a "container" for events. Spatial measurements are used to quantify the extent of distances between objects, and temporal measurements are used to quantify the durations of and between events. Excuse the philosophical jargon, but time is an a priori intuition that allows us to comprehend sense experience. Giving “Mutability” a Kantian reading, the oppressive view of mutability dies. If wearing our Blakean “mind-forg’d manacles” mutability becomes an appearance, almost an illusion. What’s behind this appearance (excuse my Kantian category mistake in this sentence) belongs inside the imaginative, liberated Romantic mind.