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...