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.
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Lyrics to Rise |
Excerpts from Hymn to Proserpine (After the Proclamation in Rome of the Christian Faith) |