Poetry Tuesday: Edmund Spenser – The Cantos of Mutability

Ken Kalis
Jan 27
3 min read

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.)

The Cantos of Mutability stand apart from the rest of The Faerie Queene. They are not chivalric romance but philosophical and theological poetry, concerned with the deepest human anxiety: everything changes.

Kingdoms rise and fall, beauty fades, power passes, and even the strongest works of man decay.

Mutability herself boasts of her dominion:

“I have the power to change and alter all,That ever was on earth, or shall befall.”

She claims sovereignty over time, nature, history, and human life. Nothing, she argues, remains.

Spenser does not dismiss the claim lightly. He allows Mutability to make her case fully. The seasons turn. Empires crumble. Generations pass. Even the heavens appear to move and shift.

To human eyes, change seems absolute.

Yet Spenser brings the matter before a higher court.

In a remarkable vision, Mutability’s claim is judged not by men, nor even by the gods of classical mythology, but by Nature herself, who points beyond change to an eternal order:

“Yet is there more in heaven and earth than this,And things eternal, which in silence be.”

Change governs the world we see, but it does not rule the world that is. Beneath motion lies permanence. Beneath time stands eternity.

The poem reaches its quiet climax in one of the most beautiful affirmations in English Christian poetry:

“For all that moveth doth in change delight,/But thenceforth all shall rest eternally.”

This is not despair but hope. Spenser affirms what Scripture declares: creation groans now, but it is not abandoned. Change is real — but it is not final.

For Christian readers, the Cantos resonate deeply with biblical truth:

“Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.” (Hebrews 13:8)

Spenser’s meditation turns our eyes from the instability of the present world to the unchanging faithfulness of God. What mutability threatens, eternity redeems.

These cantos form a fitting epilogue to The Faerie Queene. After all virtue has been explored, Spenser lifts us beyond human effort to divine constancy.

Courtesy may restrain the tongue, justice may order society, holiness may shape the soul — but only God stands unmoved by time.

In the coming weeks, we will linger with these cantos slowly, allowing Spenser to teach us how to live faithfully in a changing world while fixing our hope on the unchanging One.