Inspired by a friend’s chat line……..

Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.
William Butler Yeats

The poem is built around many binaries: many/one; leaves/root/; sway/wither; lying/truth.The central image is that of a flowering tree, with many leaves. But, it is also a fluid image—the tree changes from its full bloom ‘youth’ of ‘many’ flowers and leaves to a ‘withering’ state of ‘one’-ness. The speaker asserts that there is only one kind of truth and to reach that truth one needs to experience ‘withering’. We know that leaves wither and so do the flowers. The ‘tree’ as such has its identity from these embellishments. But, ‘death’ comes when the root withers. And, this is the irony or ambiguity that any reading of the poem must negotiate—how can the ‘truth’ symbolizing ‘root’, which is a source of nourishment for a tree, be associated with death or withering? The ‘self’ is defined by its many attributes—the professional and the personal. (the leaves help in photosynthesis and basic survival while the flowers carry out the reproductive responsibility). With age sets in withering. One no longer sways and one is no longer defined by the many. It is at this point that the poem runs out of correspondences. (tree-human: : leaves-professional attributes: : flowers-sexual/personal attributes: : youth-a tree in full bloom) What is the exact human correspondence of the ‘root’? The answer is a vague thing called ‘truth’—a term whose significance is cemented by invoking the ‘lying days of youth’. What was the lie? And, who was the liar? The expression—‘lying days of my youth’ is an adjectival phrase. ‘Lying’ is an act (and in a stand-alone situation it is a verb) but grammatically, it qualifies the noun, ‘days’ which belongs to another noun, ‘youth’. So, ‘truth’ stands against ‘the days of youth’ which are ‘lying’ in nature. Commonsense has it that ‘old age’ stands against ‘youth’. Hence, is ‘truth’ an equivalent of ‘old age’? But, epistemologically truth is the implicit state of knowledge when ‘lying’ flourishes. It is like the root that remains deep in the soil while the leaves and the flowers flourish. It is what sustains the plant, gaining nourishment from the soil. It is therefore that Yeats writes: ‘…the root is one;/Through all the lying days of my youth’. In fact, the normal grammatical syntax would be: ‘I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun through all the lying days of my youth’. The inversion connects the ‘root’, as the singular and all-pervasive thing, via the connective ‘through’ to the ‘lying’ days. In old age one comes to realize that the ‘root’ was there all along and that one never paid attention to it. Then, one realizes the ‘truth’ which is the ‘root’ or the all pervasive-ness of the ‘root’. In other words, the ‘truth’ does not have the so-called human equivalent because there is no single truth that applies to all humanity. What sustains us and remains unseen even as it is within us unlike leaves and flowers that grow on us can be discovered only when one has withered and nears death. The image of the tree stands not to supply us with exact equivalents, but, as a process of arriving at the truth. The tree discovers its roots only as it nears its end. This tragedy becomes the message of the poem. The ‘tragedy’ like that of Macbeth’s is the delay of the arrival of truth.(Recall Macbeth’s final solliloquy where he claims that ‘life is a tale told by an idiot..’and then connect it to the witche’s prognosis—‘fair is foul and foul is fair’—that was made to him even before he set on his mayhem and progrom.) The reason why we are denied an exact human equivalent of the ‘root’ is because that is not the point of the poem. The point of the poem is in the pain of the discovery—‘Now I may wither into the truth’. The verb, ‘may’ conveys a sense of leisure at the speaker’s disposal. It also conveys the sense of permission. Life now permits the speaker his moment of discovery. But, the expression ‘wither into the truth’ underlies that the withering is a kind of a journey. The negativity is moderated by the assurance of the truth and its nourishing quality—the ‘root’. But, I refuse to accept that there is any sense of fulfilment. The nature of modernist truth is that it lies in a ‘heap of broken images’, in the poet ‘shoring his fragments’. One can arrive at the truth only by withering into it. The irony that one withers into a knowledge of the source of nourishment does not imply that there is redemption even as one approaches death. If a tree dies it cannot possibly ‘wither to the root’. What remains is the pain of ignorance and this pain is the ‘truth.’ In tragedy there is no redemption—there is only the re-cognition of pain. Therein lies the difference between ordinary morbidity and tragic anagnorisis. The greatness of this poem is that it enacts a tragedy in four lines.

Many thanks to Aakash for setting me on this train of thought and to my teacher Partho Mukherjee for having taught me the meaning of tragedy. And, thanks to my teacher, Suvro Chatterjee, for imploring me to write, again.