The Two Trees

A lover urges his beloved to look within, not in the demons' mirror.

The poem sets two trees against each other. In the first stanza the speaker asks his beloved to "gaze in thine own heart", where a holy tree grows: its branches spring from joy, its fruit gives light to the stars, its root brings quiet to the night, and its moving leaves give the waves their music. Winged Loves play in its branches. In the second stanza he warns her against "the bitter glass" held up by demons, a mirror showing a barren tree of broken boughs and blackened leaves, where "ravens of unresting thought" fly. The first tree makes her eyes "full of tender care"; the second makes them "all unkind". Each stanza begins and ends on the same line, framing the choice.

Line by line

1. Lines 1 to 8The holy tree

   "Beloved, gaze in thine own heart": the holy tree grows there, its branches starting "From joy". Its fruit has "dowered the stars with merry light" and its root "Has planted quiet in the night". The inner tree feeds the whole universe, as if goodness in one heart could light the sky.

2. Lines 9 to 12The wizard song

   "The shaking of its leafy head" gives the waves "their melody" and weds the poet's lips to music, "Murmuring a wizard song for thee". The tree is a source of poetry as well as of peace.

3. Lines 13 to 20The winged Loves

   Through its "bewildered branches" fly "Winged Loves", tossing "The flaming circle of our life" to and fro like a ball. Watching them, her eyes "grow full of tender care". The stanza closes with its first line, sealing the vision.

4. Lines 21 to 28The bitter glass

   The second stanza begins with a warning: "Gaze no more in the bitter glass" that demons, "with their subtle guile", hold up. In it grows "a fatal image", a tree in stormy night with roots under snow, "Broken boughs and blackened leaves". The shorter, heavier lines here thicken the gloom.

5. Lines 29 to 32The dim glass

   "All things turn to barrenness" in this "dim glass", which is "The glass of outer weariness", made "when God slept in times of old". The dark tree is the holy one's opposite: what is seen from outside, through doubt and fatigue, not from the heart.

6. Lines 33 to 40The ravens

   Where the Loves played, "The ravens of unresting thought" now fly through "the broken branches", peering to see "men's souls bartered and bought". When she hears them, her "tender eyes grow all unkind". The poem ends on its warning line.

Themes

Context

The poem first appeared in book form in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892), among the lyrics Yeats later grouped as "The Rose". It is usually read as addressed to Maud Gonne, whom Yeats met in 1889 and loved for years, and who shared his interest in the occult.

In 1890 Yeats joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a society that studied ritual magic and the Kabbalah, whose central diagram is a Tree of Life. The holy tree of the first stanza draws on that symbol, as well as on the tree of life of Genesis.

Form

Two twenty-line stanzas, rhymed ABAB throughout. The first is in smooth iambic tetrameter; the second slips into shorter, heavily stressed lines in its middle ("Broken boughs and blackened leaves"), roughening the sound as the vision darkens. Each stanza opens and closes with the same line, so the poem stands as a pair of mirrored panels.