Anne Spencer was a poet, librarian, and gardener in Lynchburg, Virginia, whose spare but striking poems appeared in Harlem Renaissance anthologies during the 1920s. “Lines to a Nasturtium” carries the subtitle “(A lover muses),” and that private, almost overheard tone shapes the whole poem. It begins with an address to a flower, but quickly becomes an exploration of beauty as a consuming force. Watching a bee “pause, and soar” into the nasturtium’s “flaming heart,” the speaker hears “crisp, crinkled laughter” and wonders whether “the furies after tore him apart.” A hummingbird, too, flees from the flower’s “startled depths.” The central idea is not that nature is cruel, but that desire, like a flower, can lure a creature toward a bright center that may also destroy it.
The poem’s music is deliberately irregular. Lines shift between short exclamations such as “Flame-flower, Day-torch, Mauna Loa” and longer, winding sentences, so the reader feels the speaker’s uncertainty and fascination. Occasional rhymes—“flutey” with “beauty,” “swain” with “vain,” “star” with “bar”—arrive unpredictably, like snatches of a song. Spencer’s word choices layer fire and sound throughout: the nasturtium is a “Day-torch” and a “cool-hot Beauty”; its voice is “flutey”; the air around the fleeing bird is “stricken” and “drumming.” The mythic word “furies” is especially important. It comes from Greek vengeance and reappears at the end, binding the flower and the beloved in the same dangerous energy.
Midway, the speaker admits, “I cannot see, I cannot hear your flutey / Voice lure your loving swain.” He cannot fully know the flower’s seductive power, but he does know “one other” whose beauty makes the nasturtium’s competition “born in vain.” The beloved’s hair is “like the setting sun”; her eyes are “a rising star”; her movements are “gracious as reeds by Babylon.” The phrase “brown lilies sweet” announces a Harlem Renaissance concern—the celebration of Black beauty without apology or imitation. This beloved is not a pale rose or lily; she is a “brown lily,” enriched by biblical and royal echoes. Yet her splendor has the same volcanic core as the flower. The speaker recalls standing within her “fire-lit heart” and feeling “the furies / Beating, beating.” The repeated word sounds like a pulse under the skin, half caress and half warning.
Historically, the poem matters because Spencer refuses to separate beauty from danger or passion from violence. She uses the nasturtium as a vivid, living metaphor, not a static symbol. The flower is observed closely, but it is also imagined as a “Flame-flower” and a volcano named “Mauna Loa,” far larger than a backyard plant. That hyperbole gives the speaker’s private feeling grandeur. The poem also quietly recenters beauty: the woman who outshines the flower has sun and star in her features, yet she is not remote or fragile. She is warm, brown, and full of motion. “Lines to a Nasturtium” is significant because it offers a love lyric in which danger is inseparable from reverence, and in which a Black woman occupies the center of that dangerous radiance.