The Two Trees by W.B. Yeats

[pegkerr]

This poem for me contrasts the healthy creative mind with a mind crippled by depression. It's about the best description of depression (what it is like and how it feels) that I have ever read. Consider it also as a compare/contrast between the heart of flesh and the heart of stone.

Discuss.

Comments

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Have you heard Loreena McKennitt's recording of it put to music?

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Yes! I adore it. As a matter of fact, I was listening to it this afternoon, which is what led me to write that entry.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Well, duh, if I had looked at your "Music" tag I would have known that! Some days my brain seems to operate on "skip."

[elisem.livejournal.com]

I could see how you would get that. It works.

To me, it seems written for Maud Gonne during one of the difficult times of her life, but I am only guessing. She had some terrible things to deal with, and I can imagine Yeats writing the poem and trying to recall her to the inner sacred image, to give her strength or to call her away from the demons that had hold of her. Depression could certainly be such a demon, but I think for her it was more complicated and more active than that.

Then again, might not be about her at all.

I should go find that McKenna music. It sounds interesting.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

You don't know Loreena McKennitt's music???????? Somehow, to me it seems like just your kind of thing. Your jewelry makes me think of it. (This, of course, undoubtedly says far more about me than about you.)

[elisem.livejournal.com]

One follow on to the Maud Gonne thing: if it was her, and if the poem was written at the right time, she was married to an allegedly abusive man who was accused of molesting her daughter. (I do not have the info to hand on how the case eventually turned out, so I'm sticking with allegedly and was accused, at this point.) I could spin a romantic fantasy of Yeats, the one she would not ever fully join with but who wanted her more than anything, writing a poem to try to reawaken her soul, so she would have the strength to save herself from the alliance that was deadening her and destroying her child.

It certainly is an insistent call back toward the self, back toward the balancing point within the sacred, whatever it was written for.

the subconscious called up by Yeats

[shellefly.livejournal.com]

In a poetry class in college I wrote this rant against the demons inside myself that cut me down, told me I was worthless and ugly, etc. I wasn't reading Yeats at the time, but he must have stayed with me and sung to my soul.

[rachet.livejournal.com]

OK...I'm terrible at figuring out poetry. But...here's my thought...

My understanding is that one's heart holds the truth of one's existence... the beauty, accomplishment, joy and so on, and that a mirror reflects falsehoods... ugliness, age, and so on. Like when someone looks in the mirror and is surprised by what she sees, because she feels younger or prettier or whatever. Sounds to me like it was written for an aging woman gazing in a mirror and fretting over wrinkles, age spots and the like.

So..he tells her to look into her heart, not a mirror. And there she'll see a tree with all the branches which are the different paths of her life. The flowers and fruit... the beautiful, productive things from a person's life. The fruit changes colors because even the things you create do not stay in stasis. And as far as the fruit dowering the stars with light, I read that as them making the world better, brighter. The tree has a sure, hidden root, because it's in the heart, strong and at least somewhat protected. and her life has made his life better... the shaking of her leafy head makes things more beautiful for him, like giving waves their melody, and "made my lips and music wed"... she's enabled him to write, or to write better things than he would have without her, because he is inspired to make "wizard songs" for her. And in that world, the one with the tree, the one he sees as the true world, love lives. The ignorant leafy ways I think are because leaves grow at the end of branches, in the newest parts, the parts that have the least experience... they are ignorant.

Basically, the decay of the body is reflected in the mirror, not the strengths and beauties in the heart, things are breaking down, buried under white hair, dying (broken boughs and blackened leaves)... it is a reflection of outer weariness.

But I could be wrong.