Mutability ["We are as clouds that veil the… | Poetry Foundation

The life and works of Percy Bysshe Shelley exemplify English Romanticism in both its extremes of joyous ecstasy and brooding despair. Romanticism’s major themes—restlessness and brooding, rebellion against authority, interchange with nature, the power of the visionary imagination and of poetry, the pursuit of ideal...

Share I. 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:— II. 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. III. 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:— IV. It is the same!—For, be it joy or sorr

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