Percy B Shelley : ‘Mutability’, ‘O! there are spirits of the air’, ‘Ozymandias’

Introduction to Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was an English Romantic poet, known for his radical political views and for poems about nature, change and the limits of human power. The three set poems for the 2029 HKDSE are ‘Mutability’, ‘O! there are spirits of the air’ and ‘Ozymandias’ (Shelley is not on the 2027 or 2028 lists).

In Paper 2 Section B you may be asked to compare two or three set poems, by the same poet or by different poets. The poems are printed in the question paper, so the focus is on analysis, not memory.

Which edition? The HKEAA 2029 list names Shelley’s Selected Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics). Refer to each poem by its title and first line.

Which ‘Mutability’? Shelley has two poems often called ‘Mutability’. The set poem is the 1816 poem that begins “We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon”, published in the Alastor volume. It is not the later lyric that begins “The flower that smiles to-day”, which Mary Shelley titled ‘Mutability’ in 1824.

1. ‘Mutability’ (1816)

What the poem says

The poem argues that human beings are always changing. Stanza 1 compares us to clouds that shine briefly across the moonlit sky before they disappear into the night. Stanza 2 compares us to forgotten lyres whose strings respond differently to every gust of wind, so that no sound is ever repeated. Stanza 3 moves from images to plain statements: a single dream can spoil our sleep and a single stray thought can spoil our day, and our feelings swing between laughter and tears. Stanza 4 concludes that joy and sorrow both pass, that yesterday will not be like tomorrow, and that the only thing that lasts is change itself.

Form and techniques

- Form: four quatrains in iambic pentameter with alternate rhyme (ABAB). The regular form contrasts with the poem’s subject, constant change.
- Similes: the clouds and the lyres show human life as beautiful but unstable and controlled by outside forces.
- Short sentences and dashes in stanza 3 imitate the sudden changes of mood they describe.
- Paradox: the final idea, that nothing endures except change, turns change into the one permanent thing.

Key themes

Transience, the instability of human emotion, and the limits of human control.

2. ‘O! there are spirits of the air’ (1816)

What the poem says

This poem, also published in the 1816 Alastor volume, speaks directly to a lonely figure, using the old second-person form of address. This person has turned away from other people to find companionship in nature: in winds, springs and moonlit seas, and in spirits of the air. But nature did not return this love, and the person’s hopes of love from another human being also failed. The speaker asks why this person built hope on a changeable world instead of on the resources of their own mind. By the end, the person’s own soul has been turned by misery into a kind of fiend that follows like a shadow. The speaker advises the person not to try to escape it, because any change would only make things worse.

Who is addressed?

Mary Shelley later wrote that the poem was addressed in idea to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom Shelley never met. Some later critics instead read it as Shelley speaking to his own despondent spirit. In an exam, you can mention that the addressee is uncertain and focus on the feelings the poem presents.

Form and techniques

- Form: six six-line stanzas rhyming ABABCC; the last line of each stanza is longer, which gives each stanza a weighty ending.
- Direct address and rhetorical questions create an intimate, questioning tone.
- Nature imagery is beautiful but unresponsive, which challenges a simple Romantic belief in comfort from nature.
- Dark imagery at the end (a fiend, a shadow) shows despair turning inward.

Key themes

Isolation, unreturned love, disappointment with nature and people, and the idea that suffering can change the self.

3. ‘Ozymandias’ (1818)

Background

‘Ozymandias’ was first published in The Examiner in January 1818. Shelley wrote it in a friendly sonnet competition with his friend Horace Smith. Ozymandias is a Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II; the ancient Greek historian Diodorus Siculus recorded a boastful inscription on one of his statues.

What the poem says

The speaker reports what a traveller told him: in the desert stand two huge stone legs without a body. Nearby lies a broken, half-buried face whose expression shows a proud, cold ruler, and the sculptor captured these passions so well that they outlast both the sculptor and the king. On the pedestal, an inscription commands the powerful to look at the king’s works and despair. Yet nothing else remains: only the ruin and the empty desert stretching into the distance.

Form and techniques

- Form: a sonnet in iambic pentameter with an unusual, interlocking rhyme scheme that follows neither the Petrarchan nor the Shakespearean pattern exactly.
- Framed narrative: the poem passes through several voices (the speaker, the traveller, the sculptor’s art and the king’s inscription). This distance makes the great king seem small and far away.
- Irony: the inscription was meant to make others despair at the king’s greatness, but now the only reason to despair is that everything he built has vanished.
- Imagery of ruin and emptiness: the broken statue and the endless sands show the power of time.

Key themes

The pride and fall of tyrants, the temporary nature of political power, the power of time, and art that outlasts its subject.

Comparison Summary (Essential for Paper 2)

- Change and time: all three poems show that nothing stays the same. ‘Mutability’ applies this to the human mind, ‘O! there are spirits of the air’ to hope and love, and ‘Ozymandias’ to kings and empires.
- Nature: nature is beautiful but unstable in ‘Mutability’, unresponsive in ‘O! there are spirits of the air’, and overwhelming in the empty desert of ‘Ozymandias’.
- Voice: ‘Mutability’ speaks for all people in the first-person plural, ‘O! there are spirits of the air’ addresses one person directly, and ‘Ozymandias’ reports a story at second hand.
- Form: compare the quatrains, the six-line stanzas and the sonnet, and how each form shapes the argument.

You can also compare Shelley with other 2029 set poets, for example the treatment of power and death in Wilfred Owen’s poems or of nature in Ted Hughes’s poems.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

1. Using the wrong ‘Mutability’: the set poem begins “We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon”.
2. Only paraphrasing: always explain how form, imagery and sound create meaning.
3. Treating biography as proof: the addressee of ‘O! there are spirits of the air’ is uncertain, so use it carefully.
4. Missing the irony in ‘Ozymandias’: the inscription’s meaning has been reversed by time.

Quick Review: Check Your Understanding

- ‘Mutability’ (1816): four quatrains; clouds and lyres; only change lasts.
- ‘O! there are spirits of the air’ (1816): a lonely figure let down by nature and love; misery turns inward.
- ‘Ozymandias’ (1818): a ruined statue of a proud king; the irony of power and time.
- Shared idea: change and impermanence, seen in the self, in love and in history.