Easter Sunday
For Easter I offer up two April poems that work as a before and after. First, Rainer Maria Rilke speaks of the “slumbering silence” before everything bursts into flower. Then William Carlos William describes that bursting as almost too much to bear. First the breathless anticipation, then the flowering.
In the Rilke poem, the heavens are veiled and dark, the branches bare, and the afternoon long and rainy. Nevertheless, the woods are filled with wonderful smells, a lark is beginning to lift the gray heaven, and the late afternoon features a shaft of golden light that flings the raindrops against the window in a radiant shower. This is the promise of new life.
“Then all is still,” as though the world is readying itself. Think of it as the hour before the Easter dawn.
April By Rainer Maria Rilke Again the woods are odorous, the lark Lifts on upsoaring wings the heaven gray That hung above the tree-tops, veiled and dark, Where branches bare disclosed the empty day. After long rainy afternoons an hour Comes with its shafts of golden light and flings Them at the windows in a radiant shower, And raindrops beat the panes like timorous wings. Then all is still. The stones are crooned to sleep By the soft sound of rain that slowly dies; And cradled in the branches, hidden deep In each bright bud, a slumbering silence lies.
There’s little slumbering in Williams’s poem. To be sure, Williams may gesture towards T. S. Eliot’s depiction of April as the cruelest month because it wakes us out of our comfortably frozen torpor, forcing us to feel again. But Williams is ready to take on the challenge of sensation, even though it tires him out. After all, how can we say no to the pink sumac buds, to the “opening hearts of lilac leaves,” to the “many swollen limp poplar tassels”? The pounding of life’s hoofs stays with us “half through the night.”
April
By William Carlos Williams
If you had come away with me
into another state
we had been quiet together.
But there the sun coming up
out of the nothing beyond the lake was
too low in the sky,
there was too great a pushing
against him,
too much of sumac buds, pink
in the head
with the clear gum upon them,
too many opening hearts of lilac leaves,
too many, too many swollen
limp poplar tassels on the
bare branches!
It was too strong in the air.
I had no rest against that
springtime!
The pounding of the hoofs on the
raw sods
stayed with me half through the night.
I awoke smiling but tired.
Although we are living in a time of death, don’t yield to its downward pull. Life may be exhausting but (to borrow from Gerard Manley Hopkins) it is filled with the grandeur of God. We become our best selves when we welcome our inner divinity. Happy Easter.
