The Two Trees

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
The changing colours of its fruit
Have dowered the stars with merry light;
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quit in the night;
The shaking of its leafy head
Has given the waves their melody,
And made my lips and music wed,
Murmuring a wizard song for thee.
There the Loves a circle go,
The flaming circle of our days,
Grying spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways;
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the winged sandals dart,
Thine eyes grow full of tender care:
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile,
Lift up before us when they pass,
Or only gaze a little while;
For there a fatal image grows
That the stormy night receives,
Roots half hidden under snows,
Broken boughs and blackened leaves.
For all things turn to barrenness
In the dim glass the demons hold,
The glass of outer weariness,
Made when God slept in times of old.
There, through the broken branches, go
The ravens of unresting thought;
Flying, crying, to and fro,
Cruel claw and hungry throat,
Or else they stand and sniff the wind,
And shake their ragged wings; alas!
thy tender eyes grow all unkind:
Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

-William Butler Yeats, 1892

I became fascinated with this poem after hearing the Loreena McKennitt song adaptation of it.
I can just imagine a Christian looking right past the beauty of it and dismissing it as a shallow stack of look-inside-yourself-whitney-houston-hero-feel-good-humanism. Bah! Poetry that is just a little bit vague is always the best. It allows you to give it a very personal meaning. The original intention of the author is not important. I love the imagery of the tree of holiness planted inside us. Laughing and full of life. I relate well to the cynical lens of the despair demons (real or imagined?) hold. One makes my eyes bright and radiating kindness to my wife, kids, friends, and strangers. The other makes them downcast and hard.

“Made when God slept in times of old”. I imagine the giant father time, who sleeps under the earth in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia. He is sleeping in the Silver Chair when they pass by his enormous body in the deep. In The Last Battle, his silhouette is seen from hundreds of miles away as he awakes and winds his horn at the passing of the world.

There is more that I can say, but I’ll leave it at that.