I get that mutability can cycle, but his changes ultimately lead to something negative rather than something hopeful or inspiring. It says a lot about how what we think, dream, and believe is always better than reality, which is true, but as an unchanging conclusion.

It’s that attitude that marks it depressing for me. You could argue that the last stanza advises to be thankful for what you have while you have it, but nothing in the poem suggests that you’re in control of what you feel and memories can be happy rather than longing.

I suppose what’s going on in the world right now sort of skews things for me. Thinking of a time when we didn’t have a billion dollar deficit, kids and the elderly giving up food and clothing for their medication, all the fighting and the nuclear talks, the pressure environmentally to do what we can to keep the planet from turning to a huge ball of slush garbage… It’s always going to be better in retrospect. My social studies teacher once asked us if we ever wondered why no one ever said the world was in a ‘Golden Age’ till after the fact.

I guess, in part, my theory comes from having read a lot more of Shelley’s stuff recently and I don’t see him as a pessimist. He certainly “felt” his emotions strongly. But he also took up a number of social/political causes. In that regard, then, I can’t really view anything he wrote as ultimately defeatist.