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.)