mutability
The third and fourth stanzas of Percy
Bysshe Shelley's poem, "Mutability," published in the
Alastor volume in March 1816.
The fairly conventional notions of her husband's poem seem at first to
have little direct linkage with the circumstances into which Mary Shelley has thrust Victor at
this juncture. But if one looks back over the landscape of the first
volume, the operations of mutability as a force of destruction are
everywhere evident -- from the fearsome movements of sea and ice in
Walton's letters, to the sudden deaths in the Frankenstein and Moritz
households, to the unmerited reversal of Justine's fortunes. But
mutability is also the very stuff of life. Perhaps then, most of all, the
subject of the poem applies to the scientific paradigms that govern the
development of the volume -- in ancient alchemy (from the various
transmutations it would apply to base metals to its search for a means of
suspending mutability itself in the elixir of life); or in modern chemistry, which increasingly saw
organic changes in terms of chemical transformations; or in contemporary
electrical theory, where
dialectical tensions between opposing poles were held responsible for the
essential energy of life. A later poem of Percy Bysshe Shelley confronts
these ambivalences more subtly and more directly, embedding them in a
single symbolic force that is at one and same time both "Creator and
Destroyer," the "Ode to the West
Wind," written in 1819.
