Nothing says spring like the flowering bulbs suddenly showing up outside grocery stores. I splurged yesterday on a pot of three hyacinth bulbs, just for the incredible fragrance they'll bring in the house. Ours won't bloom outside for another month or so.
Hyacinths are associated with spring and rebirth. In religious tradition, the flowers represent "prudence, constancy, desire of heaven and peace of mind."
The hyacinth appears in the first section of "The Waste Land" in a conversation between the poet and the mystery "hyacinth girl." An evocative snip of poetry, if there ever was one.
Imagine this entire garden of just hyacinths, where a beautiful woman gathers them by the armload at dusk. No wonder the poet is struck speechless and blind:
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
“They called me the hyacinth girl.”
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
T.S. Eliot
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