Poetry of Amy Lowell

"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.

On one hand she is literally walking around the house hunting for Ada,
on the other hand there is a kind of spiritual search for the other person going on.

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

Madonna
the Canterbury bells
Te Deums

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.