'To Sparkle'

Almost fourteen years ago a friend gave us two anonymous bulbs about the size and color of a Bosc pear. I planted them in the front garden between the pine and the lantana and waited. One disappeared, never to bloom. The other, like crocuses in the North, is our reliable harbinger of spring: 

It’s an amaryllis, with a blossom 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 is always 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 remember Milton’s lines in “Lycidas”:

 

“To sport with Amaryllis in the shade

Or with the tangles Neaera’s hair?”

 

So each year around this time I read Milton’s poem again, just as I reread the Christmas chapters in Pickwick Papers each December and the description of a seder in Isaac Rosenfeld’s novel Passage from Home (1946) around Passover. I confess I don’t much care for the color of the flower. It’s too emphatic, almost gaudy. I’m more of a pastel partisan. What I admire is the flower’s reliability, self-reliance (no human care required) and simplicity of design: two leaves, stem, flower. More recently I found a reference to the flower in Tennyson’s “The Daisy,” set in Italy:

 

“What slender campanili grew

By bays, the peacock’s neck in hue;

Where, here and there, on sandy beaches

A milky-bell’d amaryllis blew.”