“Mutability” and “A Defence of Poetry” by Percy Bysshe Shelley Answers

Read the first stanza from "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 for ever

Read the second stanza from "Mutability.”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

Read the excerpt from "A Defence of Poetry,”We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden.

Bruno’s teacher challenged his class to create their own line of poetry to add after the final stanza of "Mutability”: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.

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Read the excerpt from "A Defence of Poetry.”A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connexion than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all other minds.

Read the fourth stanza from "Mutability.”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.

Read the second stanza from "Mutability.”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.

Read the passages."A Defence of Poetry”Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind."Mutability”We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,Streaking the darkness radiantly!—yet soonNight closes round, and they are lost for everHow does the first stanza of "Mutability” reflect the idea expressed in this excerpt from "A Defence of Poetry”?

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