What Rite?
- mrymntcpw
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
Let’s begin with a verse by Robert Frost from his “Two Tramps in Mud Time”.
The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March.
April from Aperire, Latin for “to open”.
And yet April...
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
-T.S. Eliot, excerpt from The Waste Land
In mid-Ohio, we expect March to be brutal, but April teases us with a few warm sunny days suddenly followed by severe storms and chilling cold. April struggles to open up, beckoning birds to sing, frogs to croak, and daffodils to endure the contrasts. What right does April have to open the rite of Spring? Let’s ask Igor Stravinsky. He described The Rite as “a musical choreographic work. It represents pagan Russia and is unified by a single idea: the mystery and the great surge of the creative power of spring….”
Watch and Listen:
Can I see the buds that are swelling
in the woods on the slopes
on the far side of the valley? I can’t,
of course, nor can I see
the twinleafs and anemones
that are blooming over there
bright-scattered above the dead
leaves. But the swelling buds
and little blossoms make
a new softness in the light
that is visible all the way here.
The trees, the hills that were stark
in the old cold become now
tender, and time changes.
-Wendell Berry
Aperire
Le Sacre du Printemps!
CPW