Page:Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect.pdf/24

12 be just as sensible, viewing the question abstractedly, for trees to symbolize the word ‘tree’ as for the word to symbolize the trees.

This is certainly true, and human nature sometimes works that way. For example, if you are a poet and wish to write a lyric on trees, you will walk into the forest in order that the trees may suggest the appropriate words. Thus for the poet in his ecstasy—or perhaps, agony—of composition. the trees are the symbols and the words are the meaning. He concentrates on the trees in order to get at the words.

But most of us are not poets, though we read their lyrics with proper respect. For us, the words are the symbols which enable us to capture the rapture of the poet in the forest. The poet is a person for whom visual sights and sounds and emotional experiences refer symbolically to words. The poet’s readers are people for whom his words refer symbolically to the visual sights and sounds and emotions he wants to evoke. Thus in the use of language there is a double symbolic reference:—from things to words on the part of the speaker, and from words back to things on the part of the listener.

When in an act of human experience there is a