Music and Poetry for the Third Week of Easter
Bach Suite no. 1: Prelude and Minuets
This piece is so familiar to most of us that it is easy to overlook the way it breaks with the familiar. The opening arpeggio trots out a standard trajectory but is interrupted; its pattern is involuted and extended in surprising directions. The rote becomes unfamiliar and the unfamiliar is routinized: this is a game of musical form, but it also gives us an apt way of looking at the resurrection’s reversal of the human pattern of birth and death. A prolific church musician, Johann Sebastian Bach had a taste for innovation, one that I like to think was conditioned by the surprising turn of the resurrection story. This is a familiar piece, yes, yet one that is as strange as some stories we have heard all our lives. ~Danielle Wiebe Burke
Two Sonnets for Easter
Claustrophobia and confinement are feelings that map onto the Easter story’s tale of captivity and freedom uncannily well. The moving of the stone marks a movement from constriction to freedom—from death to life. Just as Christ exits his grave, he frees us from the prison of the body: in place of a flesh that fails is a flesh that lives. Sonnets of the resurrection often play on this sense of reversed entrapment, which the sonnet form lends itself to with its fixed compartments (“little rooms”) and dense rhyme schemes. Mary Karr refers to a breath that brings life into “that battered shape” again, comparing the reinhabiting of the body to parturition, an entry into life and a breaking out of it. And Edmund Spenser refers to a “captivity thence captive,” to a Christ who has captured death. Notice how in the echochamber of his poem’s final six lines, the word “love” appears five times. Like the repetition of the first letter of the Sanskrit alphabet (om), the chant of love is a sound that breaks the bounds of the sonnet, that slips out of the tomb. ~Jordan Burke
Mary Karr, “Descending Theology: The Resurrection”
From the far star points of his pinned extremities,
cold inched in—black ice and squid ink—
till the hung flesh was empty.
Lonely in that void even for pain,
he missed his splintered feet,
the human stare buried in his face.
He ached for two hands made of meat
he could reach to the end of.
In the corpse’s core, the stone fist
of his heart began to bang
on the stiff chest’s door, and breath spilled
back into that battered shape. Now
it’s your limbs he comes to fill, as warm water
shatters at birth, rivering every way.
Edmund Spenser, “Amoretti LXVIII [68]: Most Glorious Lord of Life”
Most glorious Lord of life, that on this day,
Didst make thy triumph over death and sin:
And having harrow'd hell, didst bring away
Captivity thence captive, us to win:
This joyous day, dear Lord, with joy begin,
And grant that we for whom thou diddest die,
Being with thy dear blood clean wash'd from sin,
May live for ever in felicity.
And that thy love we weighing worthily,
May likewise love thee for the same again:
And for thy sake, that all like dear didst buy,
With love may one another entertain.
So let us love, dear love, like as we ought,
Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught.