And she, in wonder, reached out with both hands to take the lovely plaything; and the earth of the wide ways gaped open across the Nysian plain, and there the lord sprang out, the Receiver of Many, with his immortal horses: the son of Kronos, the god of many names.

Athyrma, "plaything," is the word for a child's toy. The poem sees the flower through the eyes of the girl who reaches for it. No one knows where the Nysian plain was. Nysa was a name for the mountain where Dionysus was raised, placed by different writers in Thrace, Asia, Arabia and Africa. It may simply mean a faraway sacred place. The epithet euryagyia, "of the wide streets," is usually given to cities; here it makes the earth a city, and the underworld below it the city of the dead.