Mutability & Tintern Abbey
English Lit: Edexcel A Level Frankenstein, topic 3.1.4
Mutability
The text makes reference to many other texts. The main sources are The Prometheus myth, Paradise Lost, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Tintern Abbey and Mutability.
Mutability
- Shelley uses an extract from her husband’s poem Mutability, from his 1816 collection Alastor; or the Spirit of Solitude and other poems.
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:
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.’
Nature and change
- This is all about the inevitability of change within the life of humans.
- It is ironic as when Victor references this poem, feeling utterly at ease in nature, he is moments away from his first meeting with the Monster, changing from peace to chaos.
Subconsciousness
- The extract from the poem Shelley has chosen focuses upon the concept that man is never truly free, as even when he sleeps, he cannot control his subconscious.
- Perhaps we are to view the Monster as Victor’s subconscious?
Tintern Abbey
The text makes reference to many other texts. The main sources are The Prometheus myth, Paradise Lost, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Tintern Abbey and Mutability.
Tintern Abbey
- Shelley also includes six lines from one of the most famous Romantic poems, Tintern Abbey, by William Wordsworth.
- This focuses on the sublime power of nature and how it can touch the human soul.
Tintern Abbey
- “The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
And appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrow’d from the eye.”
Nature versus science
- Victor remembers these lines when thinking about his friend Henry Clerval, who the reader finds out, in a cataphoric reference/ prolepsis, is now dead.
- By paralleling Clerval with nature, it places Victor as the antithesis, as Man or Science in the Nature versus Science/ Man dichotomy.
Clerval
- Victor laments the beauty of nature and the virtuous character of Clerval, yet doesn’t seem to fully accept that he is the agent for the destruction of his best friend or the nature he is in awe of.
Test yourself on Mutability & Tintern Abbey
What is the extract from Mutability about?
What collection of poems is Mutability from?
What does Tintern Abbey focus on?