Read the excerpt from "A Defence of Poetry.”These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship, is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined organization, but they can colour all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the representation of a scene or a passion, will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past.
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
In "A Defence of Poetry,” Shelley suggests that emotions experienced in life are constantly changing. Which lines from "Mutability” can also be seen as a reflection of this idea?
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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.
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Read the passage from "A Defence of Poetry.”A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not.In his poem "Mutability,” Shelley
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
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.
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.
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