The Poison Tree by William Blake provides a clear lesson on how to handle anger both with

a friend and enemy. The narration is first person point of view with a nameless speaker.
The poetic form has four quatrains with a set rhyme scheme: AABB. This means that each
quatrain has two couplets. This rhyme scheme creates a simple and easy way to follow the
flow of the poem. It makes a powerful statement about how conflict should be handled. In
his poem, Blake warns about the ill effects of holding malice inside oneself. The poem is a
metaphor for what happens when one allows anger to grow within.
The first quatrain describes a friend getting angry at his friend. Because the speaker knew
and liked this person, he explained his feelings and the conflict was resolved. The anger
ended. On the other hand, the speaker clashed with a person that he did not like. He held
that irritation inside and did not express or tell the other person what was wrong. That
resentment began to grow inside the speaker.
The second quatrain begins the extended metaphor with the comparison of the anger and the
poison tree. Initiating the idea of the narrator cultivating his rage, he waters the budding tree
with fear and tears every day and even the night. Still, the enemy does not know of this
growing fury. Fear can make a person act out of character and lose his emotional balance.
Deceptively, the speaker employs his smiles as though it was the application of the sun to this
toxic tree. With charm, he allows no interjection or awareness of his wrath.
And I watered it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.
The third quatrain nurtures the tree/ire metaphor. Anger poisons the human spirit;
furthermore, it endangers the ability to use logical reasoning. Finally, this tree bears the fruit
of the narrators fury in the form of a beautiful, appealing apple as in the Biblical forbidden
fruit. The enemy desires the apple and realizes that it belongs to the speaker.
The final quatrain brings the anger to an end; however, the narrator has lost his humanity.
He now is glad that the enemy is dead. The fruit of his antagonism [the poison apple] lured
the enemy into the garden; he ate the apple; and now the foe has been eradicated. The last
couplet indicates that the narrator finds comfort in the death of the other man.
Blake uses the poem as a warning to those who harbor grudges and allow the feelings of
resentment to stay inside without dealing with them. Communication becomes the only way
to avoid the fruit of the poison tree.

William Blakes A Poison Tree: Critique and Appraisal

Human beings, along with the ability to reason and question, possess the capacity to
hate, and yet also to forgive. Unfortunately, forgiving someone is not always as easy
as holding a grudge against them and this lack of control over ones actions is
inherent to human nature. In A poison tree, William Blake critically discusses these
two opposing forces, uncovering the inherent weakness in humans, and the effects of
these innate flaws.
Through the use of extended metaphors and vivid imagery, Blake symbolically
portrays this fundamental flaw through the poem. The central theme in the poem is
hatred and anger, dominating much of the authors thoughts. Blake expresses this
through the introduction of a clever parallelism the treatment of anger between a
friend and a foe. Through this, Blake emphasizes the nature of anger while
expressing and letting go of wrath ends it, suppression nurtures it. Blake startles the
reader with the clarity of the poem, and with metaphors that can apply to many
instances of life. A Poison Tree is an allegory. The tree here represents repressed
wrath; the water represents fear; the apple is symbolic of the fruit of the deceit which
results from repression. This deceit gives rise to the speakers action in laying a
death-trap for his enemy. The deeper meaning of the poem is that aggressive
feelings, if suppressed, almost certainly destroy personal relationships.
And it grew both day and night
Till it bore an apple bright
Blake further symbolizes this in the next two stanzas. He appears to metaphor the
repression of anger and hatred to a poison tree, thus giving it an identity. The
personification in A Poison Tree exists both as a means by which the poems
metaphors are revealed, supported, and as a way for Blake to forecast the greater
illustration of the wrath. The wrath the speaker feels is not directly personified as a
tree, but as something that grows slowly and bears fruit. In the opening stanza the
speaker states, My wrath did grow. The speaker later describes the living nature of
the wrath as one which, grew both day and night, and, bore an apple bright. This
comparison by personification of wrath to a tree illustrates the speakers idea that,
like the slow and steady growth of a tree, anger and wrath gradually accumulate and
form just as mighty and deadly as a poisoned tree.

And I water d it in fears,

Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles
To understand the metaphorical sense of the poem, one must first examine the title,
A Poison Tree, which alerts the reader that some type of metaphor will stand to
dominate the poem. In the second stanza, Blake employs several metaphors that
reflect the growing and nurturing of a tree which compare to the feeding of hate and
vanity explored by the speaker. The verses, And I watered it with my tears show
how the tears life lead an object of destruction. The speaker goes further to say, And
I sunned it with smiles describing not only false intentions, but the processing of
sunning, giving nutrients to a plant so that it may not only grow and live, but
flourish. In both of these metaphors, the basic elements for a tree to survive, water
and sunlight are shown in human despair and sadness.
Blake called the original draft of A Poison Tree Christian Forbearance, suggesting
that what is meant to appear as a gentle attitude is often a mask for disdain and
anger. Furthermore, Blake believed that the attitudes of piety that adherents of
conventional Christianity were taught to maintain actually led to hypocrisy, causing
people to pretend to be friendly and accepting when they were not. The
righteousness that the conventional religion prescribed, Blake believed, allowed
people to hide evil intent and to perform evil deeds, such as stifling the healthy
growth of children, under the cover of appearing virtuous.
And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree
The religious context of the poem is also evident in two metaphorical allusions made
by the speaker towards the end of the poem. Blake, being a religious visionary, has
also criticized the views and actions of Christianity. This is evident in the symbol of
the poison tree, which can be seen to make direct biblical reference to the tree of
knowledge, representing the evil existing within man. Thus, as the garden is symbolic
of the Garden of Eden, the apple is symbolic of apple which brought Adam and eve to
their demise. It is the evil and poison that is bared from anger, the fruit of the poison
tree. As in the biblical story, the apple here is beautiful on the outside, while

poisonous and deadly underneath. By presenting the apple, Black is symbolic of the
Serpent, maliciously deceiving his foe and bringing his demise. The serpent in Black
is his weakness, and just like he, all humans have this inherent flaw inside of them.
Black uses this to criticize Christian forgiveness, expressing that while Christians
believe in turning the other cheek, by forgiving and repressing anger, they are
ignoring the basic flaw existing in our human nature. Symbolically, the speaker
represents God, the foe and garden represent Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden,
and the tree represents the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in Genesis. If this
analogy is true, it shows God rejoicing in killing his enemies, which most people
think the God they know would never do.
Conclusively, A Poison Tree teaches a lesson and asserts a moral proposition rather
than offering a critique of a theological system, the lesson is less concerned with
anger than with demonstrating that suppressing the expression of feelings leads to a
corruption of those feelings, to a decay of innocence, and to the growth of cunning
and guile. Repeatedly in Songs of Experience, not just in A Poison Tree, Blake
argues that the religious doctrines intended to train people, especially children, in
virtue are cruel and cause harm. In addition, Blake depicts those who implement
religious discipline as sadistic. Blakes poetry, while easy to understand and
simplistic, usually implies a moral motif on an almost basic level. The powerful
figurative language in A Poison Tree is so apparent that it brings forth an apparent
message as well. The poem is not a celebration of wrath; rather it is Blakes cry
against it. Through this, Blake warns the reader of the dangers of repression and of
rejoicing in the sorrow of our foes.