Imagining Mutability

Are we helpless before it?

“Mutability” isn’t a word that’s often used these days. And yet it uniquely evokes a sentiment familiar to many of us: an uneasy feeling of the world’s changeableness. We talk nervously about shifts in the “global order” and about the loss of the “rule of law” and of “societal norms.” We worry about climate collapse and other imminent disasters. The ground seems to be shifting beneath our feet.

Is mutability our fate? Are we helpless before it?

One way I’ve found to escape or at least ease the angst that thoughts of mutability arouse in me is to check in on what others before us, and especially poets, have had to say about the word and the anxiety underlying it. Two great English poets, from very different eras, come quickly to my mind: Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and Edmund Spenser (1552-1599).

Here’s Shelley’s “Mutability,” published in 1816:

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon:

How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,

Streaking the darkness radiantly!—yet soon

Night closes round, and they are lost forever:

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings

Give various response to each varying blast,

To whose frail frame no second motion brings

One mood or modulation like the last.

We rest.—A dream has power to poison sleep;

We rise.—One wandering thought pollutes the day;

We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;

Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:

It is the same!—For, be it joy or sorrow,

The path of its departure still is free:

Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;

Nought may endure but mutability!

It’s perhaps no surprise that Shelley, writing at the dawn of the modern era, imagines mutability as I and many of us today tend to do, as a fearful thing, a force that tosses us up and down helplessly, in our waking lives and in our dreams. But what fascinates me about the poem is its reliance on structure to express its meaning. It’s as if, for Shelley, mutability has no way of presenting its case without its opposite, stability, to frame it.

How does “Mutability” accomplish this apparently self-contradictory feat of both evoking mutability while at the same time containing it?

The poem does so, I think, by playing the poet’s increasingly panicky voice against the security of the poem’s four iambic pentameter quatrains and its ABAB rhyme scheme. For from within that secure framework the poet’s agitation surges, bearing the reader along in its wake, moving us towards the inescapable conclusion that we are all victims of change. We begin in stanza one with a brief glance at the ceaselessly shifting night sky. Then in stanza two we recoil from “forgotten lyres,” untuned and therefore dissonant. We rush on in stanza three to our own presumably chaotic dreaming and waking lives. We seem to arrive at a definitive conclusion in stanza four, but it’s a conclusion enforced upon us by the blunt paradox of Shelley’s final line, one he almost shouts out at us:

Naught may endure but mutability!

But can a paradox conclude? Or does it merely look like an ending without being one? Shelley’s paradox fixes us nowhere except in the certainty that we have no certainty. The world swirls around us and the best we can do is affirm that, yes, swirling is what the world is doing, and that we are swirling with it.

I have to wonder, though: Is a paradox the best we can do in imagining mutability?

I don’t believe the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser would have thought so. Or not at least a paradox arrived at in this way.

It’s not as if Spenser wasn’t well acquainted with mutability. In his verse epic, The Fairie Queene, he fashioned a testament to mutability’s power. All of the poem’s characters and their actions have to be read allegorically, on at least two levels, a physical and a spiritual one. Their mutability—their oscillation between their roles as dramatic characters and as spiritual abstractions—is built into who and what they are. For example: The Red Cross Knight we meet in Canto I of Book One is an allegorical stand-in for Holiness. The knight embodies a supernatural truth. But you wouldn’t know that from your first look at him:

A gentle knight was pricking [spurring his horse] on the plain…

That memorable opening, brief as it is, typifies Spenser’s gift for dramatizing his characters’ trials without turning them into cardboard cutouts, mere ciphers for the higher reality they represent. And that higher reality is always enlivened by the actions of the characters who embody it, as the Red Cross Knight’s actions do in the adventures that follow.

But the key interest for us in Spenser is a long verse fragment published after his death, a fragment written in the same verse form as The Fairie Queene and appended to it. The fragment is called The Mutability Cantos. It, like The Fairy Queene, is an allegorical drama, this time depicting the goddess Mutability’s lengthy, elaborate claim before Nature’s throne to be the sole ruler of the created universe. Nature acknowledges Mutability’s claim, but overrules it. The created universe, Nature says, is governed not by contingencies, but by final causes—not by change, but what change leads to: the perfection of all things. Or in the parlance of Spenser’s day, by providence, not by fate.

The Mutability Cantos don’t end here, though. There exists a final Canto, itself a fragment, containing just two verses, consisting of Spenser’s own comment on the drama he has just staged for us:

When I bethink me on that speech whilere [just past]

Of Mutability, and well it weigh,

Me seems that though she all unworthy were

Of the heaven’s rule, yet very sooth to say,

In all things else she bears the greatest sway,

That makes me loathe [reluctant] this state of life so tickle [unstable]

And love of things so vain to cast away;

Whose flowering pride, so fading and so fickle,

Short Time shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle.

Then gin I think on that which Nature said.

Of that same time when no more change shall be,

But steadfast rest of all things, firmly stayed

Upon the pillars of eternity,

That is contrair [opposite to] to Mutability,

For all that moveth doth in change delight;

But thenceforth all shall rest eternally

With Him that is the God of Sabaoth hight [named].

O that great Sabaoth God, grant me that Sabbath’s sight.

In the first of these two stanzas, Spenser—unlike Shelley— can acknowledge Mutability’s power without feeling overwhelmed by it. His reflective distance allows him to weigh both Mutability’s claim as well as Nature’s overrule of it. Spenser applauds the first before graciously accepting the second.

But Spenser, like Shelley, still wants to reconcile his ambivalence between the claims of change and those of order. So he creates his own paradox, not noisily insistent like Shelley’s but joyfully inventive. It’s a paradox in the form of a play on words: on “Sabaoth,” a military term in Hebrew, meaning, “Lord of Hosts,” and, also in Hebrew, “Sabbath,” meaning “rest.”

O that great Sabaoth God, grant me that Sabbath’s sight.

Spenser appeals to a higher power who manifests itself both in our world of change (as the God of Sabaoth) and in a realm of permanence (as the God of the Sabbath, the transcendent God). But it is the same God. Resolving paradox is God’s work, not a poet’s. Mutability cannot be framed or contained by a verse form or any other human contrivance. Only a supervenient force can bring order to our mutability by encompassing both.

Something for us all to consider as we fret about the changes that appear to be tearing us apart.

After getting his PhD in English literature, George Dardess taught close reading to his own students until his retirement. Since then he has been ordained a Deacon in the Roman Catholic Church and written several books on Muslim-Christian relations. He has also created the graphic novel Foreign Exchange.

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