Caves are essential to the survival of bats, and caves that are ideal for hibernation or raising young bats can sometimes contain roosts of millions of individual bats. During warmer months, these bats fly out of their cave roosts en masse each evening to hunt.

Rise - Hymn to Proserpine visualizes the experience of bats rising from the earth to fly out under the stars.

This work is one of three based on the harmony and melody in Eddie Vedder's song Rise. It contains some of Vedder's lyrics, along with excerpts from the poem Hymn to Proserpine by Algernon Charles Swinburne. Swinburne's poem is a dedication to the Roman goddess Proserpina, the queen of the underworld. According to Roman myth, Proserpina spends half of the year in the underworld with Dis, and half above ground with her mother Ceres. She symbolizes the seasons and the harvest, with plants growing and bearing fruit in spring and summer, and after the harvest, lying fallow in fall and winter. Proserpina was revered as the goddess of death.

Listen to Rise and see excerpts from Swinburne's Hymn to Proserpine.

Lyrics to Rise
by Eddie Vedder

Such is the way of the world
You can never know
Just where to put all your faith
And how will it grow

Gonna rise up
Burning black holes in dark memories
Gonna rise up
Turning mistakes into gold

Such is the passage of time
Too fast to fold
And suddenly swallowed by signs
Low and behold

Gonna rise up
Find my direction magnetically
Gonna rise up
Throw down my ace in the hole

Excerpts from Hymn to Proserpine (After the Proclamation in Rome of the Christian Faith)
By Algernon Charles Swinburne

In the night where thine eyes are as moons are in heaven, the night where thou art,
Where the silence is more than all tunes, where sleep overflows from the heart,
Where the poppies are sweet as the rose in our world, and the red rose is white,
And the wind falls faint as it blows with the fume of the flowers of the night,
And the murmur of spirits that sleep in the shadow of Gods from afar
Grows dim in thine ears and deep, as the deep dim soul of a star,
In the sweet low light of thy face, under heavens untrod by the sun,
Let my soul with their souls find place, and forget what is done and undone.

All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye pass and be past;
Ye are Gods, and behold, ye shall die, and the waves be upon you at last.

And the wonderful waters knew her, the winds and the viewless ways,
And the roses grew rosier, and bluer the sea-blue stream of the bays.