Shelley’s speaker looks at human life and sees a series of dissolving shapes. We’re compared first to clouds streaking across the moon—briefly brilliant, then swallowed up forever—then to an old lyre that never sounds the same way twice as the wind shifts. The same restless logic rules our inner weather. In sleep, a dream can taint everything; awake, a single stray thought can darken the hours. We swing between laughter and tears, clutching pain or throwing it aside, but every emotion goes just as freely as it arrived. There’s no holding onto joy or sorrow, and no two days repeat each other. The mood is one of pensive acceptance, a little mournful but clear-eyed. The only thing that stays is the fact of change itself—the quiet, relentless truth that we are made of passing moments and can never truly stand still.
Mutability — Summary
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 for ever:
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.