ABSTRACT
The lines, with their characteristic mixture of self-respect and selfcontempt, define both the dramatic difference between Yeats' earlier and later poetry and the deep continuity which underlies the difference. The reader of Yeats must keep firmly in mind these two aspects of the poet's achievement. He must decline to see the later poetry as a disowning of the earlier and he must also be reluctant to see it as the mere reformation of what has already been said, the throwing away of an embroidered cloak. Thus, in The Countess Cathleen, the tree grows like the 'holy tree' from the heart, but it is fundamentally not a tree of joy but of protest, imagined in terms that approach the hyperbolical:
I have sworn, By her whose heart the seven sorrows have pierced, To pray before this altar until my heart Has grown to Heaven like a tree, and there Rustled its leaves till Heaven has saved my people. (CPI, p. 27)
In A Prayer for my Daughter the tree is again seen in the interior landscape:
May she become a flourishing hidden tree That all her thoughts may like the linnet be, And have no business but dispensing round Their magnanimities of sound. (CP, p. 213)
This particular tree, however, has also exterior and social roots:
How but in custom and in ceremony Are innocence and beauty born? Ceremony's a name for the rich horn, And custom for the spreading laurel tree. (CP, p. 214)
In Vacillation, written when Yeats' mind had grown closer to its complete poetic definition, the tree of the heart embodies the heart's complexity, the organic interdependence of both life-giving and destructive elements:
A tree there is that from its topmost bough Is half all glittering flame and half all green Abounding foliage moistened with the dew; And half is half and yet is all the scene; And half and half consume what they renew. (CP, pp. 282-3)
In Among School Children the tree remains the holy tree but it grows differently in a different landscape:
0 chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? 0 body swayed to music, 0 brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance? (CP, p. 245)
Kermode is, of course, right in suggesting that 'this image summarises the traditional Romantic critical analogy of art as organism' and in tracing the two trees back (like so many of Yeats' poetic possessions) to an antithesis of Blake: 'Art is the tree of lifeScience is the tree of Death.' Nevertheless the image is obviously more than the embodiment of a theory of the artistic process. The massive stresses of 'chestnut-tree, great-rooted' (where even the hyphenation assists the poetic effort) set against the scintillating
movement of 'Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?' create an equilibrium of energy and rootedness that continues to be meaningful outside the immediate situation or the traditional symbol. It is tempting to point to the conclusion of Hindu philosophy that the roots both of reality and of creative power, of stillness and motion, lie within the self; but it is better to recognise simply that we are dealing with poetry written at the full stretch of Yeats' powers. Both the immediacy and the range of validity are part of the poem's way of life and the fusion is of a kind that no other poet has achieved in our time. These qualities of Yeats' writing will receive further exploration later; at the moment it is sufficient to say that the tree, even if it was Blake's tree in the first place, need no longer be framed in Blake's antithesis. It is also not quite the tree of 'trembling flowers'; its branches 'start' not from straightforward 'joy' but from 'Beauty born out of its own despair' and, in one of Yeats' daring and characteristic juxtapositions, from the 'bleareyed wisdom' of the labouring scholar. The imagery is not simply more complex; its ability to live through its own irony makes it more confident and robust and the product of a different imaginative climate. Finally, the tree is not talked about but presented; it represents, in other words, the difference between gesture and experience.
