SOURCE: Severance, Sibyl Lutz. “‘Some Other Figure’: The Vision of Change in Flowres of Sion, 1623.” Spenser Studies 2 (1981): 217-28.

[In the following essay, Severance explores Drummond's Flowres of Sion, focusing on its structure and religious symbolism.]

William Drummond's vision of change shapes his poetic sequence, Flowres of Sion (1623). The first sonnet insistently defines his theme:

All onely constant is in constant Change,
What done is, is undone, and when undone,
Into some other figure doth it range,
Thus rolles the restlesse World beneath the Moone.(1)

This sonnet also proffers the solution for earthly inconstancy as the poet resolves to fix his mind, as well as his sequence, on Christ's permanence, to find an order above the mutable processes of nature: “Wherefore (my Minde) above Time, Motion, Place, / Thee raise, and Steppes not reach'd by Nature, trace.” Here are introduced the several oppositions that will become the sequence's central concerns: man and Christ, earth's disillusions opposed to heaven's fulfillment, the mutability of time against the permanence of eternity. To effect these contrasts, Drummond employs change, so that his images and his numerological structure consist of one figure bearing another—“some other figure”—within the first. The reality or the hope of transformation from one to another is always present. This is the most marked characteristic of Drummond's poetics—that the change he decries becomes his vehicle to permanence; paradoxically, change overcomes change as the passages of mortality lead to eternity.

For example, the motif of the “Flowre which lingringly doth fade” recurs throughout the sequence; however, the flower symbolizes eternity as well as time's passing. In the title the poet longs for unchanging “Flowres of Sion,” those “Flowres which feare not the rage of Dayes.” A second cluster of double images comprises astronomical figures that signal both human temporality and divine timelessness. The sun signs man's shortness of days: “Thy Sunne postes Westward, passed is thy Morne, / And twice it is not given thee to be borne.” Yet Christ masters the sun and is the sun; he figures eternity. At his nativity he reversed night's darkness to day: “This is that Night, no, Day growne great with Blisse.” Day and sun, then, signify both man's grief and bliss. While not as pervasive as astronomical or flower images, architectural figures, monuments of triumph in particular, rise as other focal images of change. They express fallen man, the risen Christ, and God the creator. The first sonnet warns of the mutability of man's triumphal monuments, beginning with “Triumphant Arches.” The arch here represents the insubstantiality of man's deeds, but later in the sequence it stands for God's omnipotence. His triumphant arch is the “azure Canopie of Heaven,” or “Heavens high vault.” The triumphal motif appears again at Christ's crucifixion, his victory over death in the seventeenth poem, and at his resurrection, celebrated by the Easter hymn.

However, the principal illustration of the differences between Christ's nature and man's occurs in the numerological structure of Flowres of Sion where the numbers figure Drummond's dual vision and provide the means for his changes. Drummond has not been well served by critics who have ignored the structural plan and therefore have failed to hear the resonance and strength the poetry receives from the unity of the whole. French Fogle's Critical Study of William Drummond of Hawthornden treats genres discretely, placing discussions of sonnets, madrigals, and songs and hymns in separate chapters, thus implicitly denying the importance of Drummond's structural concepts.² Nevertheless, Fogle is troubled by certain problems he sees in the complete sequence, particularly its failure, according to him, to fulfill Drummond's stated purpose of the first sonnet. For Fogle, there are “surprisingly few references to God and Christ in these avowedly religious sonnets” (p. 63). Yet the central grouping of thirteen of the thirty-three poems in Flowres of Sion considers Christ. Four sonnets are devoted to the nativity, three to the need for Christ's redeeming presence, while five concentrate on the crucifixion. The section concludes with a celebratory Easter hymn. In addition, the overall theme, image pattern, and structural numerology are all designed to emphasize the Christian's hope.

More recent criticism of the sequence by Robert Macdonald, in his 1976 edition of Drummond's work, sees the unity of Flowres of Sion fashioned through the “solemn music of meditation.”³ While admiring the “architectural splendour” of the whole work, Macdonald overlooks the plan of the sequence, viewing the complete work as amorphous “variations on conventional religious themes” (p. xxii). Such structure as Macdonald finds in Flowres, he attributes to the “Catholic three-fold meditational process: first memory of the Christian predicament, then understanding of the Christian solution, then finally adoration of God, who planned the mystery” (p. 197). This imposition of structure on the sequence disregards Drummond's divisions and misreads the poetry by applying a designation of memory to poems that treat of man's present condition, by placing understanding as the heading for the memory of Christ's life and sacrifice, and by neglecting a further section, which treats of man's present misery in the world. The final poems do, however, adore God. Although the tone of the poetry is frequently meditational, the structure does not follow traditional meditational order.

Drummond's numerology clarifies his intentions in Flowres of Sion. … He complies with medieval and Renaissance practice that organized literary works in symbolic numerical groupings, believing that such organization followed God's creative plans. The most frequently quoted support for this numerological structuring came from the Wisdom of Solomon: “omnia in mensura, et numero, et pondere disposuisti” (“Thou hast ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight”).⁴ In ordering their creations with deliberate care as to measure, weight, and number, Renaissance poets, including Spenser, Milton, Sidney, and Drummond's good friend, Drayton, represented the correspondences they believed present between number and meaning. A random arrangement would have contradicted the order they saw in all creative processes. Religious poetic sequences of the period reflect their authors' belief in the significance of numerical arrangement. This is true of at least two books preceding Flowres of Sion: Barnabe Barnes's A Divine Centurie of Spirituall Sonnets (1595) and Henry Lok's Sundry Christian Passions (1593). In each, a fixed numerical form holds the “mutable” content, as the poets use groupings of one hundred poems or centuries to show man's religious experience.

Drummond's book, which honors Christ's life and examines man's mutable state, includes a variety of numerological patterns that are predominantly based on temporal numbers, the most significant of which is the basic structural number thirty-three, the number of lyrics in the principal part of the sequence. Thirty-three, of course, refers to the number of Christ's mortal years and was a common organizing number for medieval and Renaissance authors. Cassiodorus justifies his use of the number thirty-three for his sacred letters, saying that it corresponds with “the age of the Lord when he offered eternal life to a world laid low by sin and granted rewards without end to those who believed.”⁵ In Contra Faustum Manichaeum Augustine structures his refutation of heresy in thirty-three chapters. Similarly, George Herbert uses thirty-three as the sequence number of “Sinne (II)” in “The Church” division of The Temple, thus acknowledging Christ's continuing defense of man from sin.⁶ Here the opposition between sequence number and subject illustrates the poem's insistence that sin is “flat opposite to th' almighty,” as sin is “overpowered” by Christ's emblem, thirty-three.⁷ Elizabeth Hageman shows in “Calendrical Symbolism and the Unity of Crashaw's Carmen Deo Nostro” the appropriateness of Crashaw's choice of thirty-three poems for his sequence.⁸

Drummond's numerological divisions of Flowres of Sion are as follows: the first seven poems consider the uncertainties and sorrows of man's time on earth; the second group, twelve plus one, focuses on Christ's life on earth and exults over his resurrection in an Easter song; the third grouping again consists of twelve plus one, a section of poems reconsidering mutability and other earthly problems, followed by a concluding, visionary song of life. After these major groups, a new section begins, entitled “An Hymne of the Fairest Faire,” which includes two songs of praise. Evidence of the centrality of temporal numbers to the sequential plan is clear in the thirty-three of Christ's life, the seven, symbolic of days of the week, and the twelve, signifying months of the year. Against the temporal stands the eternity of Christ's presence, for in each case the temporal number reminds us of the sacred and enduring as well as the mutable. For example, while thirty-three means Christ's mortal life, it also reminds us of man's promised immortality, secured through Christ's death. Similarly, seven, a primary temporal number, marking the passing of man's days and his movement toward death, also “frequently expresses … whatever [the Scripture] desires to be understood as continuous and perpetual,” according to Cassiodorus (p. 142). Vincent Hopper in Medieval Number Symbolism points out the almost inevitable connections Christians made between twelve months and twelve apostles.⁹ Twelve, the months of man's year, was “a number particularly associated with Christ, who added 2 Commandments to the Decalogue and chose 12 disciples” (p. 111) and gives a figure of the sacred and immutable, showing the same duality possessed by thirty-three and seven. Behind Drummond's dual vision is the Christian's sense of God as the One, the source of all numbers, forming their fixed and changing characters.

The poems are true to their numerological groupings in their themes. Changes of earthly time move throughout the first seven poems. As has been noted, the first sonnet laments such change, instructing us about time's destruction of triumphal monuments as well as the state “which unsatiate Mindes in blood doe raise.” This negation of human effort extends even to literature: “what wee write to keep our Name, / Like Spiders Caules are made the sport of Dayes.” The next six poems continue the theme of time's wearing away of man and the world he falsely values as Drummond examines the “Treasurie which banckrupt Time devoures” (no. 2), the nearness of “our Cradles to our Coffines” (no. 3), asking us to “thinke aright, / Of what yet restes thee of Lifes wasting Day” (no. 4), listing the “wounds of abject Time” (no. 5). The sixth and seventh poems, in preparation for the poems on Christ's coming, turn from the delusions of time and world, a “nought, a thought, a show of golden Dreames” (no. 6) or a marginal picture (no. 7) to fix on Christ, the poet's “onely God,” the sun of wisdom, power, and providence. These variations on man's frailty reenact through word and number the shortness of life and the continuing plight of man, as they turn toward the succor promised by the next section.

This second group, twelve plus one, is further divided through theme and number into clusters of four, three, five, and one, detailing Christ's nativity, the necessity for his sacrifice, his crucifixion, and his resurrection. Appropriately, four, which gathers the poems on Christ's birth as man, is the symbol of man.¹⁰ The first of the nativity poems sets forth man's grief and God's comprehension. This sonnet, the eighth poem in the sequence, carries the figure of redemption in its numerical order since eight is the number of salvation (Hopper, pp. 77, 85).

The Griefe was common, common were the Cryes,
Teares, Sobbes, and Groanes of that afflicted Traine,
Which of Gods chosen did the Summe containe,
And Earth rebounded with them, pierc'd were Skies.

The theme of the work continues in the imagery of the birth of a “Saviour … more olde than yeares,” who is the victor over time. Succeeding the nativity sonnets are three which continue the explanation of why God descended as man, for their common theme concerns sinning man, showing in turn a type of Christ—John the Baptist—then Mary Magdalene, the sinning woman, and the Prodigal Son, the sinning man. Although a type of Christ, John the Baptist finds his warnings to repent are ineffectual. Drummond describes the unheeded calls from this “last and greatest Herauld of Heavens King”:

There burst he foorth, All yee whose Hopes relye
On God, with mee amidst these Desarts mourne,
Repent, repent, and from olde errours turne.
Who listned to his voyce, obey'd his cry
Onely the Ecchoes which hee made relent
Rung from their flintie Caves, repent, repent.

The next poems on Mary Magdalene and the Prodigal Son show the repentance occasioned by Christ's presence as the woman implores, “My faults confest (Lord) say they are forgiven,” and the man prays, “Father and Lord I turne, thy Love (yet great) / My faults will pardon, pittie mine estate.” These three poems of sin, repentance, and Christ's redemptive power signify the omnipotence of God, the Trinity, and join with the four nativity poems to establish Christ, the God/man, a meaning of seven quite apart from that of the temporal seven in the first grouping. This numerology corresponds with the iconographic geometry of Renaissance representations of Christ as Theanthropos. The Nativity by Petrus Christus (in the National Gallery of Art, Washington) joins square and triangle, as Joel Upton explains: “the lower section … circumscribed by the square and depicting the newborn Christ lying on the ground surrounded by Mary and Joseph, represents the Incarnate Christ, a physical, terrestrial reality. While … the triangle superimposed above, divided into three main subordinate parts, is a clear expression of the Trinity, or the abstract, divine realm.”¹¹ By using four and three, the numbers of square and triangle, Drummond similarly represents the incarnation of divine power.

Decorum also exists between subject and number in the five poems on the crucifixion. Five as a number symbolizes the cross, as Hopper notes: “The cross was conceived to have 4 or 5 points—5 if the intersection was included. … As an emblem of 5, it coincided with the 5 wounds in providing the salvation of man with his 5 senses, or of those living under the Old Dispensation of the Pentateuch” (p. 84n). Within Drummond's five crucifixion poems we find the center sonnet of particular interest because it serves as a paradigm of the Renaissance numerological practice of devoting the center of a work to a figure of triumph.¹² The seventeenth poem is the center of the major section of Flowres of Sion and also the midpoint poem of the five crucifixion poems. Therefore, its exultant opening is not as unusual as it first might seem for a poem on Christ's death: “Come forth, come forth yee blest triumphing Bands.” The triumph celebrated, of course, is God's over “Death, Hell, the wrath, the life, the harmes.” Drummond's emphasis of the center as the point of triumph is not only consonant with Renaissance architecture and poetics, but also with his own theme and the images he has established thus far in the sequence. The first poem's sense of the mutability of mortal triumphs is assuaged in the seventeenth poem by the triumphant angels acknowledging Christ's eternal victory. Drummond succeeds in raising his steps beyond nature in his midpoint poem.

The final poem of the Christ segment of Flowres of Sion is a song extolling Christ, rejoicing over his resurrection and commemorating Easter. Fittingly, it stands beyond the twelve of time, which are connected with the events of Christ's life, and is single, acknowledging the oneness of God, the unity of his world in word and number. Its sequence position, number twenty, witnesses to the perfection of the second person of the Trinity (ten, the number of perfection and unity, multiplied by two, Christ's position in the Trinity). This song is the central of the sequence's three songs and repeats the motif of triumph, “Haile holie Victor, greatest Victor haile.”

The sequence returns to poems of temporal concern and number, twelve, giving a further portrait of the world needing redemption from time and falsity. The twelve plus one of the second and third sections establish a like symmetry of number, but the organizations of the sacred and secular sections differ markedly. Drummond's amorphous organization of the poems dealing with man's life directly contrasts with his exact chronological and numerological grouping of the poems based on Christ's life. Again this organizational practice resembles that of other Renaissance Protestant poets, such as Barnes, Lok, and Herbert, who found no sustained advancement toward salvation and thus chose to represent in the ordering of their religious sequences the relative disorder, the errant nature of human experience. Drummond, then, mixes poems about man's ignorance and the disappointments of earth and of human love with poems criticizing new fashions or hypocrisy or praising nature's benefits and the mind's integrity. The twelve poems end with a meditation on death. A varied collection indeed, yet the section suggests the diversity of human experience. The last song stands apart as a reprise of earlier ideas reminding the reader, “On God the Minde to rest, / Burnt up with sacred Fire, / Possessing him to be by him possest” and a final call to “Leave flying Joyes, embrace this lasting Blisse.” As the thirty-three poems end, we can reread Drummond's purpose for the sequence in the total numbers of the genres he has given us. The sequence has included twenty-five sonnets, five madrigals, and three songs. Symbolically, these numbers figure the natural world, twenty-five, redeemed by Christ's crucifixion, five, paying homage to the overarching power of the Trinity, three.¹³

In completing this section of Flowres of Sion, Drummond makes visible, in the spatial design his sequence shapes, his sense of the temporal, of the contraries which may be embodied in one form—an image, a number, a man's life. If we arrange Drummond's poems from Flowres of Sion in an arch shape, moving to the right two spaces as each change in genre occurs … the resulting configuration speaks the poet's vision.¹⁴ The arch, whole and ordered on one side, broken and disordered on the other, represents in one figure Drummond's two-sided apprehension of the sacred and the profane, salvation and the fallen world of man's time.

Here the uniformity and stability of the left side generally correspond to the sequence's poems about Christ and his triumph, while the changing, fragmented shape of the right side is consonant with the poems of man's experience and failures.

Drummond's symbolic use of the arch as a figure of multiple meanings corresponds with arch iconography in medieval and Renaissance paintings. He would have been familiar with depictions of arches, particularly in nativity paintings, where an arch often rises in the background or occasionally serves as a frame in the foreground.¹⁵ In outline the arches may be whole, but they may also contain jagged fragments on one side or may abut or frame decaying walls, falling bricks, and buildings. Such paintings indicate that Christ's birth offered an entrance into salvation, redemption for the fallen world, or suggest the triumph of Christianity over the crumbling ruins of pagan antiquity. One of the earliest examples of the combination of whole arch and ruins appears in Fra Filippo Lippi's The Adoration of the Magi (in the National Gallery of Art, Washington). Through the arch of the porta salvationis throng the worshippers, while half-clothed pagans perch on the ruins, which join the arch at right angles.¹⁶ Later examples of similar unions of arches and ruins include Veronese's Adoration of the Magi, lifting an elaborate arch of triumph beside decaying structures in the background of the nativity scene, and Dürer's Virgin and Child. The latter picture shows in the same figure the serenity of an arch outlined against the sky and the fragmented stone jutting from the arch's side.¹⁷

Drummond's figures of time and immortality serve as the foundation of his sequence as they bear his recognition of the present reality and his vision of a future ideal. Yet the sequence moves finally beyond the temporality expressed by the poems. If we count only the poems of each grouping, the sequence is weighted toward time and earth's decreations, but the alterations present in the thematic sections take us through time to the eternal and again through time to the eternal. And appended to the thirty-three poems concerning the numbers and words of time in Flowres of Sion are two songs under the heading of “An Hymne of the Fairest Faire.” These are Neoplatonic adorations of God's glory and omnipotence—his eternity. The careful printing of the first observes the numerological decorum symbolizing Christ's divine nature overcoming the passage of years, for the poem's 336 lines are printed on ten pages of 33 lines each, and a concluding page of 6 lines—Christ's mortal years, thirty-three, multiplied and transformed by the figure of God's unity and divine perfection, ten, to which is added the summary of earthly perfection, six.¹⁸ The longing in Drummond's poetry for such unity, perfection, and immutability may have been deepened by the events of 1623—his own depression and the fire and famine that consumed Edinburgh.¹⁹ But opposing the background of mutability, Flowres of Sion remains faithful to Drummond's hope of eternity—in its individual poems and in its structural vision.²⁰

Notes

1. William Drummond, Flowres of Sion (Edinburgh, 1623; rpt. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd., 1973). All references to Drummond's poetry will be from this edition.

2. French Rowe Fogle, A Critical Study of William Drummond of Hawthornden (New York: King's Crown Press, Columbia University, 1952). Hereafter cited in the text.

3. Robert H. Macdonald, ed. Poems and Prose of Wm. Drummond of Hawthornden (Edinburgh: Scottish Academie Press, 1976), p. xxi. Hereafter cited in the text.

4. Vulgate, Liber sapientae 11.21. In the Authorized Version of the Apocrypha, the verse is numbered 20.

5. Cassiodorus Senator, An Introduction to Divine and Human Readings, trans. Leslie Webber Jones (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), p. 142. Hereafter cited in the text.

6. See my article, “Numerological Structures in The Temple,” in “Too Rich to Clothe the Sunne”: Essays on George Herbert, ed. Ted-Larry Pebworth and Claude J. Summers (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980), pp. 229-49.

7. George Herbert, Works, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (1941; corrected rpt. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1945).

8. Paper given at the Folger Shakespeare Library Colloquium, Washington, D.C., April 1979.

9. (1938; rpt. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, Inc., 1969), p. 130. Hereafter cited in the text.

10. Augustine, On John 9.14, in The Works of Aurelius Augustine, trans. Marcus Dods (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1871-76). The four letters of Adam signify that man is a tetrad.

11. Joel M. Upton, “Devotional Imagery and Style in the Washington Nativity by Petrus Christus,” in Studies in the History of Art, vol. 7 (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1977), pp. 75-76.

12. Alastair Fowler, Triumphal Forms: Structural Patterns in Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. xi. Fowler points out that two of the most frequent numerical organizational patterns are those of triumph and time and that these often occur together. His chapter, “Numerology of the Centre,” pp. 62-88, discusses in detail the importance of the center, especially in triumphal forms.

13. The symbolism of twenty-five comes from Christopher Butler's Number Symbolism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 150, and represents the world of the senses, five, squared.

14. Fowler, Triumphal Forms, p. 17. Fowler notes the “spatial character of Renaissance thought” and Renaissance authors' “tendency to order ideas in visual schemes,” ut pictura poesis. Later in his work he demonstrates how not only poems were shaped but sequences as well were built in particular configurations, such as the triangular shapes formed by Shakespeare's Sonnets (pp. 185-187). Per Palme, “Ut Architectura Poesis,” in Idea and Form: Studies in the History of Art, Ake Bengtsson, ed. (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1959), also gives evidence of analogies between the structural unity of poetry and architectural forms (pp. 18-19).

15. Drummond attended law lectures in Bourges and Paris in 1607-1608, and during this period he sent back to Scotland descriptions of paintings he saw in the Paris galleries. Sidney Lee, “Drummond, William, of Hawthornden,” DNB (1921-22).

16. Jeffrey Ruda identifies the arch as the porta salvationis in “The National Gallery Tondo of the Adoration of the Magi and the Early Style of Filippo Lippi,” in Studies in the History of Art, 7.37.

17. Arnold Whittick, Symbols, Signs and Their Meaning (London: Leonard Hill Ltd., 1960), p. 362. Whittick cites the pictures listed in the text, both of which are in the National Gallery, London. Gertrude Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, trans. Janet Seligman (Greenwich, Ct.: New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1971), discusses symbolism of broken walls, particularly garden walls, vol. 3, p. 50.

18. This numerology of line placement testifies to Drummond's care and exactness in overseeing the printing of his work, which is noted by Robert H. Macdonald in The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971), p. 22.

19. DNB, p. 46.

20. The figure of Flowres of Sion, 1623, changes in the 1630 edition when Drummond adds three poems to his work: a hymn on Christ's ascension, another meditative sonnet on man's death, and a third broken song to “An Hymne of the Fairest Faire.” Symmetry is preserved in the opposition of two poems on Christ's immortality to two poems on man's death, while the new number of “An Hymne” proclaims the Trinity's might, yet the overall numerological structure is blurred. Drummond's purpose is less clear. The 1656 edition, published after Drummond's death and edited by Milton's nephew Edward Phillips, returns to the text of the 1623 edition. Drummond's closest friend, his brother-in-law Sir John Scott of Scotstarvet, provided the manuscript from which the poems were printed, according to the account in L. E. Kastner's The Poetical Works of William Drummond of Hawthornden, (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1913), vol. 1, pp. lxxxiv-lxxxv. Presumably, Sir John would have known the meticulous Drummond's wishes about the edition the poet wished to stand as definitive.

A version of this paper was given at the Northeast Modern Language Association Convention, March 1980.