ABSTRACT
Date of composition unknown; here assigned to winter 1815–16 mainly on grounds of stylistic maturity. Lines 1–4 suggest a late autumn or winter night, but this could have been equally well a night in 1814. Coleridge’s ‘Eolian Harp’, which may have influenced lines 5–8, was read in 1815 (Mary Jnl i 90); and as a meditation on the transience and vulnerability of human life, the poem is likely to be associated with S.’s supposed serious illness in spring 1815 (see headnote to Alastor). In a letter dated by Jones 4 November 1814 (L i 418–19), S. told Mary: ‘I am an harp responsive to every wind. The scented gale of summer can wake it to sweet melody, but rough cold blasts draw forth discordances & jarring sounds’; but S.’s letters to Hogg in September 1815 contain reflections on mortality likewise in the mood of the poem. For the theme of ‘mutability’, the sources are numerous, and include Ovid’s exposition of the Pythagorean flux, ‘cuncta fluunt …’ (Metamorphoses xv 178–355), and Spenser’s ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’ (FQ VII vii 13–56).
