Clemency suggests

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Celebrating renewal

Kate Chisholm

Wednesday, 26th March 2008

Sunday Feature (BBC Radio 3); CD Review (BBC Radio 3)

Not Bach, or Beethoven, to celebrate the Easter season on Radio Three, but a series of programmes dedicated to Spring. Not that you would have discovered this from the Radio Times, which gave us a few lolloping rabbits and the strangest and most unappetising-looking Easter eggs but nothing to suggest that Radio Three has been making an effort to give some shape and purpose to the daily grind by acknowledging on air the transition from darkest winter to the Rites of Spring. This year’s spring, of course, is playing hooky, and for most of us Easter was colder and whiter than Christmas. It’s all the fault of those bearded clerics back in the 7th century who declared at Whitby that the Easter festival of Redemption and Resurrection should take place in Britain according to the ancient Alexandrian calculation. Suddenly in 2008 we’ve found ourselves at Easter before the clocks have sprung forward and while the earth’s still hard as iron. It’s come uncommonly early, almost you might say supernaturally so, on the same weekend as the vernal equinox and an extraordinarily bright full moon, and suddenly everyone seems to know that it’s all because of the synchronicity between the lunar cycle and the vernal equinox.

Pagan Spring and Christian Easter have come together, as one great festival of renewal, of rebirth, of new shoots appearing out of dry tubers and the song of the nightingale echoing through woods carpeted with timorous violets. Well, almost. The birds may be singing at 4 a.m. and the willow is in full leaf but in the woods at the weekend snow was falling through the trees and there was not a primrose to be seen.

Thank heavens, then, for Radio Three and its determination to celebrate all things vernal, no matter that the temperature outside is colder than in deepest winter. On the Sunday Feature, the naturalist Richard Mabey wondered why spring has such special significance for us. Why does it inspire more poetry than any other? Why do we associate it with rebirth and renewal? As human beings, we don’t have an annual cycle of dying down and springing back to life (although that’s the psychological journey which Christians make each Lent and Easter through the dramatic re-enactment of the Passion and Resurrection, as do many other religions). Nor do we breed only in spring; and although many of us might wish that we could experience an annual migration to the South it’s not built into our biorhythmic make-up. And yet in some way spring, more than winter, summer or even autumn, draws out of us a response from our deepest parts, our most natural selves.

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