"Madonna of the Evening Flowers"
Amy Lowell

"I think the Canterbury bells1 are playing little tunes."

        1Little bell-shaped blue flowers; Lowell puns on the bells of Canterbury Cathedral in England in England pealing out religious music.

"While all about us peal the loud, sweet, Te Deums2 of the Canterbury bells."
        2Te Deum laudamus, "We praise you, Oh God."  The first line to a popular Catholic prayer.


Lowell writes in the style of Walt Whitman.  Notice how varied her lines are in length.


What seems superficially like a mundane conversation about flowers is a spiritual experience to Lowell, as indicated by the following items:

Ada is a Madonna to her. The Madonna is the Virgin Mary, so the search for Ada is a spiritual quest. The divine is in the ordinary.  The garden brings us into contact with the spiritual, as in the Garden of Eden, the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives, or the garden where Jesus was buried.  Merging the physical and the spiritual is also Whitmanesque.