ABSTRACT
The imagination produces a “translucency of the intelligible in the real” and the resultant image is not susceptible to ordinary intellectual analysis, any more than you can describe a tree by cutting it up. The instance that comes first to mind is famous page in Wilhelm Meister, where Hamlet is compared to a tree — “it is a trunk with boughs, leaves, buds, blossoms and fruit. The good tree is desire and divine energy, the bad is morality and nature, the fallen world, selfhood and abstraction. All this symbolism Yeats is trying to incorporate in what appears an insubstantial song. The tree is responsible for a universal harmony, the prerequisite of traditional symbolist systems, and also for the song of poets. The Tree is in a sense necessary to the Dancer, since it so powerfully reinforces the idea of integrity — “root, shoot, blossom” — in the Image, and provides a traditional analogy in support of the Image’s independent life.
