| Sumario: | Medievalist Carl Phelpstead's critique of the environmental humanities's narrowly earth-centric focus asks us to look heavenward, to think "cosmocritically" to expand our awareness for how attitudes toward the heaven shape those on earth. This article takes up that challenge to reconsider how rhetorical structures within The Mutabilitie Cantos (1609) interrogate its celestial, sovereign Jovian apotheosis as well as its Neoplatonic and Christian consolations that favor a future heaven above a terrestrial earth with its "state of life so tickle" (7.8.1). The essay explores the tensions between the Cantos ' ostensible thrust toward heavenly sovereignty and their insistent division into dichotomous forms. The close readings stitch the formal logics at work in the microcosm of the stanza to the thematic macrocosm of the Cantos ' concluding vision. Through this methodology, the essay reveals an unorthodox poetic cosmovisión to underlie the coda to The Faerie Queene (1596) that counters so much of the poem's seemingly centripetal design for celestial (and transcendent) centers of power. A pervasive formal and ideological merism—the figurative trope that encompasses a totality via binary halves—or merismus , complicates sovereignty's singular bias and throws into question the desire for "rest" eternal, peace "With Him that is the God of Sabbaoth height" (7.8.2). The "dark conceit" of "Sabaoths sight" might be construed as a vision of a "still" eternity that envisions the equivalent of an extinction event where powers and potentials beyond human existence thwart any transcendent Neoplatonist, Protestant translation into eternal heavenly forms of life. Its ecological consequences constitute a vanishing.
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