In the bulb there is a flower

In the bulb there is a flower. Natalie Sleeth* (1930-1992). Written in 1985, and first performed as an anthem at the Pasadena Community Church, St Petersburg, Florida, in March of that year (Young, 1993, p. 413). It was entitled ‘Hymn of promise’. In her Adventures of the Soul (Carol Stream, Illinois, 1987) Sleeth recalled that she was ‘pondering the ideas of life, and death, spring and winter…Good Friday and Easter, and the whole reawakening of the world that happens every spring’. A friend drew her attention to the line in T.S. Eliot’s ‘East Coker’, ‘In my end is my beginning’ (associated with Mary Queen of Scots), and she wrote the anthem in ‘the next day or two’. She was attempting ‘to...