`To Sport with Amaryllis in the Shade'

A former newspaper colleague gave us a paper sack holding two anonymous bulbs, each about the size of a Vidalia onion. This was a few days before Halloween. The following weekend I planted them, a pig in a poke, next to the lantana in the front yard, and expected nothing. Quickly, two green spikes poked through the soil and grew at an alarming rate. Each is leafless and about as tall as a cat, and this week one of them blossomed. It's an amaryllis, with a flower the color of a pomegranate. The name derives from a shepherdess in Virgil’s Eclogues, from the Greek amarysso, “to sparkle,” though my first thought was of Marian the Librarian’s instructions to her piano student in The Music Man: “Now don’t dawdle, Amaryllis.” At a more elevated level I thought of Milton’s lines in “Lycidas”: 

“To sport with Amaryllis in the shade

Or with the tangles Neaera’s hair?” 

The poem moves me each time I read it and leaves me feeling annoyed with Dr. Johnson’s failure to appreciate the poem in his “Life of Milton.” In “Lycidas," he says, “…the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing. What beauty there is we must therefore seek in the sentiments and images. It is not to be considered as the effusion of real passion; for passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions.” Johnson dismisses the poem as “a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting.”

Harsh, baffling words that remind us never to dismiss a critic or any writer for a single egregiously faulty lapse in taste. We all nod, even the greatest critic in the language.