Last week, we stood at the threshold of Edmund Spenser’s Cantos of Mutability, where the great poet turns from the virtues he has spent a lifetime shaping — holiness, justice, courtesy — and asks a deeper, more unsettling question. What happens to virtue, to order, even to goodness itself, in a world where everything changes? This week, before we go any further, it helps to know exactly where we are — and where Spenser is taking us.

Change, Time, and the God Who Does Not Change With the completion of The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser might well have laid down his pen. The great moral sequence was finished. Holiness, temperance, chastity, friendship, justice, and courtesy had each been given their place. Yet Spenser added something more — not another virtue, but a question. That question is Mutability. (the quality of being liable to undergo change or alteration.)

With Book VI, Edmund Spenser brings The Faerie Queene to its moral completion. After holiness, temperance, chastity, friendship, and justice, he turns to a virtue often misunderstood: Courtesy. For Spenser, courtesy is not mere manners or polish; it is virtue made visible in daily human life. The knight of this book, Sir Calidore, is introduced as one who embodies gentle strength: “Of all the vertues which in man are found,/Courtesy is the chiefest of them all.” Courte

The turning of the year is always bittersweet. We look back with gratitude, sometimes with sorrow — and we look forward with hope, sometimes with trembling. We stand between “what has been” and “what may yet be.” Few poems capture that holy tension like Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ring Out, Wild Bells.” It appears as Canto CVI in his long work In Memoriam, written over many years in the wake of the early death of his closest friend, Arthur Hallam.

When I was in the primary class at Emmanuel Pentecostal Church in the 1950s, we little ones stood on the platform and repeated "Pieces" like this one: I know of a name a beautiful name/ that unto a babe was given The stars glittered bright t/hroughout that glad night And angels praised God in heaven. That was my introduction to poetry at Christmas, how was I to know the poetry had been going on for centuries? Read on, and see why!

Edmund Spenser’s Book V of The Faerie Queene is the most severe, controversial, and unsettling book in the entire poem. Here, the ruling virtue is Justice, embodied in the knight Artegal, and guided—some would say driven—by the iron enforcer Talus, a relentless man of metal who knows neither pity nor pause.

I knew such women when I needed them most, when I was filled with passion. ---They were like Britomart in purity and worship manifested in their beauty. ---Faithfulness and a meek and quiet spirit was their way. ---We see them in Dante's Beatrice, Dickens' Agnes, and Jepthah's daughter. They can only be found in the beauties of holiness from the womb of the morning: (Psalm 110:3

Temperance and patience were a long time in being added to my faith. (2 Peter 1:6) ---I was a wild and crazy guy, hot or cold, like the Apostle Peter. --- Guyon proved a powerful example for me. ---I was caught in the Bower of Bliss and far from the House of Alma. ---But faith got me there through the power of the Holy Ghost. Sir Guyon's victory can be yours too. Read on!

In the world of English literature, few works hold the same enchantment as Edmund Spenser's (c1542-1599) The Faerie Queene. This epic poem consists of over 36,000 lines, making it one of the longest poems in English history. It serves as a rich narrative filled with knights, virtues, and intricate allegories. Comprising six books and utilizing the innovative Spenserian stanza, this poetic masterpiece explores moral archetypes and offers insights into the political dynamics o

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