Close Reading Rupert Brooke’s “Mutability”

What’s valuable doesn’t have to be permanent.

In a recent post, my friend George Dardess focused on the theme of “mutability” in poems by Shelley and Spenser. I’m grateful for his insights into these writers, the words they find and the structures they organize to evoke and contain the hard reality of change and the fear it engenders. We’d like to escape the pressure of mortality, the knowledge that from the moment we’re born, we’re dying. Shelley and Spenser show there’s no evading this common fate, that all is change, all will end.

George’s post prompted me to turn to other poems about mutability. That’s one of the rewards of a good close reading: it begins a dialogue and guides us from one literary work to others.

I remembered Rupert Brooke’s sonnet “Mutability,” included in 1914 and Other Poems, published in May 1915, a month after he passed away from blood poisoning aboard a hospital ship off the coast of Skyros in the Aegean Sea. Brooke was handsome, talented, and charming; he was just twenty-seven when he died.

“Mutability,” Brooke’s one-word title, means changeableness—the quality of being liable to change, of not remaining the same. It includes ontological change (things altering over time) and psychological or moral inconstancy in feeling, belief, or will. In literature and philosophy, “mutability” connotes the instability of the human condition and the impermanence of creation, especially as contrasted with a realm of eternal forms or divine truths.

Brooke begins with an observation that’s not his own, which has been reported to him:

They say there’s a high windless world and strange,

Out of the wash of days and temporal tide,

Where Faith and Good, Wisdom and Truth abide,

Æterna corpora, subject to no change.

In the first line, the iambic stress should fall on “say”: that’s what they say. Maybe what they say is true, maybe not. But it’s possible that both one-syllable words are stressed: you know what they say, you’ve heard it. Brooke next could have written “strange, high windless world,” which would slow the pace and direct us to the great wide setting that human beings inhabit. But as we complete the line, he wants us to be thinking less about the world than about its sheer strangeness.

The learned, doctrinal-sounding Latin phrase “Æterna corpora” means “eternal bodies” or “imperishable substances.” It comes from classical and Christian sources—from Plato and Lucretius, among others, and from Church Fathers who adapted such language to refer to the resurrection of the physical body into an immortal, glorified state. The virtues that Brooke names are the Æterna corpora—the only realities immune to decline and decay, the deterioration caused by the “temporal tide,” its relentless eroding motion.

“Subject to no change”: Brooks points to sameness and stability. But notice that the word he uses to end the line is “change,” and it resonates as the first quatrain closes. It’s strange—so the rhyme insists—this fact of change. We remain aware of its force even when we profess to deny it.

Brooke continues:

There the sure suns of those pale shadows move;

There stand the immortal ensigns of our war;

Our melting flesh fixed Beauty there, a star,

And perishing hearts, imperishable Love….

There’s more to reality than mutability. There’s immortality, where Love never perishes, is never destroyed or ruined. Melting flesh has become “fixed Beauty”; perishing hearts are associated with “imperishable Love.” Then, a pause, an ellipsis: the meaning drifts off, and the force of the verb “fixed” begins to fade.

Brooke shifts direction:

Dear, we know only that we sigh, kiss, smile;

Each kiss lasts but the kissing; and grief goes over;

The laugh dies with the lips, ‘Love’ with the lover;

Love has no habitation but the heart.

Poor straws! on the dark flood we catch awhile,

Cling, and are born into the night apart.

In the octave, the speaker was addressing the reader. Now, in the sestet, he turns to his beloved, and his words bear witness to the intimacy that unites them, and to its collapse. The phrase “They say” in line 1 has been replaced by “we know only.” It’s their actions of sighing, kissing, smiling, laughing, and grieving that Brooke foregrounds: acts and emotions that vanish as they occur. Pleasure and pain alike are strictly time bound: there is no ‘Love’ that endures. It dies the instant it’s expressed.

Brooke’s speaker pities himself, his beloved, and, by implication, everybody: we’re wisps, fragments, helpless in watery darkness. We can’t see each other; we “catch awhile,” then “cling,” holding on tightly and tenaciously, this verb receiving a firm stress that accents its desperate clarity.

We’re not born into the light of day; we’re “born into the night apart,” into separation. Not union, then, but mutability; not love that lifts us higher into transcendence, but love that evaporates as we experience it.

The alliteration and parallelism in “The laugh dies with the lips, ‘Love’ with the lover,” together with the closing image of being “born into the night apart,” seal the grim conclusion: the eternity that philosophers and theologians have honored doesn’t exist in any way we can know. There’s no minimizing loss, no denying its force.

On the other hand: Brooke says that love matters, however fragile and fleeting it is. It’s true that every kiss expires, but that’s better than the alternative, which would be a life without kisses, an existence from birth to grave with no love in it at all. With someone “Dear,” there is warmth and tenderness. What’s valuable doesn’t have to be permanent.

Looking over this post, I wonder how George would reply to it, and how others would respond to the two of us. This is my conception of close reading, that it’s an ongoing dialogue, a yearning for and realization of companionship and community. It’s change in the sense of evolution, development, and progress toward deeper understanding, a source of mutual insight amid an ever-transforming, mortally bound existence. Through it, we affirm we’ll keep learning as long as we’re living.

Close reading thus is a strategy for coping with mutability. We read and reread, and talk and discuss, seeing new things, knowing and accepting that thought and feeling do not stand still. Each close reading is part of the ongoing story we tell about ourselves: it reveals who we are, what we believe, what we care about.

We’re interested in and curious about everything that human beings can and cannot do with language, its powers and limits, and we share the discoveries we make. That’s why we love literature, and why we value all it teaches us about the complexities of words and its connections to the hearts and minds of others.

William E. Cain is Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English at Wellesley College, where he enjoys teaching courses on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other American writers. His recent publications include essays on Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway.

We invite you to learn more about Slant Books here.