Juliana Madrone

I’ve been thinking about spring a lot lately; it’s impossible not to really, when the tulips are bursting forth with such force and the birds outside my window so thoroughly drown out the usual morning stirrings. Even the apple blossoms are valiantly hanging on against the last violent breaths of winter. How incongruous these images are with the crashing force of the season in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring! (You can hear a very polished version here,  especially the bit starting at about 3 ½ minutes.) Its thunderous earth-stomping suggests a radically different and altogether more wild vision of this season of growth. And then again, in the hands of Pablo Neruda spring embodies sexuality, as in his poem “Gardening Girl.”

Is spring the only season capable of containing such opposing characteristics – to be at once fragile, violent, and inherently sexy?