Mutability (poem)
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"Mutability" is a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley which appeared in the 1816 collection Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude: And Other Poems. Half of the poem is quoted in his wife Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) although his authorship is not acknowledged, while the 1816 poem by Leigh Hunt is acknowledged with the name of the author given. Only Percy Bysshe Shelley is not acknowledged as an author.[1] There is also a prose version or further elaboration of the same themes of the poem in Frankenstein that immediately precedes the quotation of the poem.
The eight lines from "Mutability" which are quoted in Frankenstein occur in Chapter 10 when Victor Frankenstein climbs Glacier Montanvert in the Swiss Alps and encounters the Creature. Frankenstein recites:
"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."
The monster also quotes a line from the poem in Chapter 15 of Frankenstein, saying: "'The path of my departure was free;' and there was none to lament my annihilation."[2]