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A Poison Tree - William

Blake
2013/06/07
I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears,

Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night.

Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.

And into my garden stole,

When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning glad I see;
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

MEANING OF DIFFICULT WORDS

1. Wrath -
strong, stern, or fierce anger; deeply resentful indignation;
ire.
2. Deceit – distortion
of the truth for the purpose of misleading; duplicity; fraud;
cheating
3. Wiles – Trick, trap
4. Veiled – conceal, lacking clarity or distinctness
 POETIC/LITERARY DEVICES
1. Personification
- Waters the wrath with fear
- I told my wrath, my wrath did end

2. Metaphor
-The tree is considered as a wrath/anger
-"Till it bore an apple bright", the apple is a metaphor for
the "fruit" of his grudge.

3. Alliteration
-sunned and smiles
-friend and foe
-bore and bright

4. Imagery
- Throughout the poem

5. Irony
-the foe beneath the tree of hatred

6. Repitition
-“I was angry with my friend… I was angry with my foe”

7. Allusion
-"Garden.. apple...tree" alludes to Adam & Eve, the Garden
of Eden.

STANZA BY STANZA ANALYSIS

Stanza 1: William Blake speaks of someone, his friend and
his foe, whom has he is angry with. When he says ‘I told my
wrath, my wrath did end’ after he said he was angry with
his friend, he is saying he was able to get over being angry
with his friend and forgot about it. Although, it is quite the
opposite when he mentions’ I told it not, and my wrath did
grow’. Blake is saying that with his enemy, he allowed
himself to get angry, and therefore, his wrath did grow.
Stanza 2: In this stanza, Blake begins to make his anger
grow and he takes pleasure in it, comparing his anger with
something, in this case, a tree or plant. The speaker says
he ‘sunned it with smiles’ and ‘and with soft, deceitful
wiles’. This means he is creating an illusion with his enemy
saying he is pretending to be friendly to seduce and bring
him closer.

Stanza 3: ‘And it grew both day and night’ and ‘til it bore an
apple bright’ are meaning that his illusion with his enemy is
growing and growing until it became a strong and tempting
thing. His illusion has a metaphor and it is an apple. After,
his foe believes it shines, which means he thinks it’s true
and means something, and takes Blake illusion seriously.
‘And he knew it was mine’ suggests that he really thinks
Blake is his friend.

Stanza 4: Being the last stanza, Blake needed to come up

with a conclusion. He has used the two lines ‘in the morning
glad I see’ and ‘my foe outstretched beneath the tree’ to
say that his foe finally fell to his tempting illusion and
metaphorically, consumed his poison apple and died. So,
obviously, his malicious intentions were hidden behind
illusion and he prevailed over his enemy.

CRITICAL APPRECIATION
In the first stanza, the consequence of allowing anger to
continue instead of stopping it as it begins is shown. This
consequence is simply that it will continue to grow.
However, as the poem progresses, it is seen that this
continued growth of anger can yield harmful results as the
enemy, or foe, is lured toward the tree and eats of its fruit,
the poison apple. This kills his foe, as he is seen
outstretched beneath the tree, a sight the speaker is glad
to see the next morning. These final two lines explain one
of the main themes of the poem, which is that anger leads
to self-destruction. The speaker’s anger grows and
eventually becomes so powerful that it has changes from
simple anger with another person, to desire to see them
dead. One of the subjects of Blake’s work was the
underworld, or Hell, and knowing this, it can be seen that
the destruction which results from anger is not physical, but
spiritual. In addition, the death of the foe, which the
speaker is glad to see, does not spiritually affect the foe as
the speaker is affected, but only physically harms the foe.

READING MATERIAL
Interpretation and Symbolism
After reading such an amoral poem, the search for hope or
alternate meaning begins. A metaphor lives inside the
poem, but instead of making the poem less wicked, the
analogy confuses and questions faith.
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.
Blake’s poem is peculiar even for today’s standards, and his
analogy may be ruthless and insensitive, but he does get
the reader thinking. By looking further into the poem, we
find that the speaker nourishes and feeds his wrath, which
symbolically is the tree from the Garden of Eden. Is Blake
suggesting that God fed his wrath and anger into the tree
and intended for man to eat from it? If so, He is creating a
world doomed to His wrath and anger, an idea just about
anybody would shutter at.

Note:
William Blakewas an English Dissenter and Dissenter members
broke away from the Anglican Church. Dissenters believed that
the policies of the Anglican Church were wrong and so opposed
it. Blake began writing a collection of poems called Songs of
Experience to protest the Anglican Church's policy of stifling
"sinful" emotions in people, such as anger. A Poison Tree is
a good example of this because it shows how Blake
believed that stifling anger would only cause the anger to
grow. In fact, Blake even decided to call the original draft of
a Poison Tree, "Christian Forebearance." However, the
English government did not tolerate the radical actions of
the English Dissenters and they persecuted them.

http://www.enotes.com/homework-help/plz-im-having-an-
exam-soonly-need-whole-summary-341271
Summary
“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 narrator’s 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.

Theme

The theme of William Blake's "The Poison Tree" looks deceptively simple (anger), but it's
not. Rather, the theme lies in how suppressing one's anger can actually make it grow more
than it was before. Blake presents a Old Testament-esque Christian allegory, similar to the
Garden of Eden story, to indirectly reveal his themes of forbearance, self-restraint, and
moderation.

The original title of the poem in his anthology Songs of Experience was "Christian
Forbearance." Speaking from experience himself, Blake says that secretly hiding angry
feelings from others will only let them fester until they destroy both parties. So says Enotes:

The principal theme of "A Poison Tree" is not anger itself but how the suppression of anger
leads to the cultivation of anger. Burying anger rather than exposing it and acknowledging it,
according to "A Poison Tree," turns anger into a seed that will germinate. Through the
cultivation of that seed, which is nourished by the energy of the angry person, wrath grows
into a mighty and destructive force.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu4QW3gWrUM

moral lesson

William Blake intends, in A Poison Tree, to warn his readers that if they ignore his message
regarding the "deceitful wiles" that cause hatred to intensify due to a lack of communication,
they too can end up "outstretch'd beneath the tree" or be a person destroyed by his own
"wrath." In the poem, the narrator's "foe" becomes less afraid of the narrator, and does not
realize the depth of his hatred as the narrator "sunned it with smiles" misleading the enemy.
The deceit becomes so intense that it bears "an apple bright." Most readers would be familiar
with any story of the core or center of an apple being bad, as it appears in The Creation, when
Eve first eats from the apple and then deceives Adam- the figurative "poison" being how they
lost their innocence and Eve effectively poisoned Adam's mind and also in Snow White, the
wicked queen deceives Snow White, also an innocent young girl literally poisoned.

The moral lessons in A Poison Tree include the need to be cautious of the motives of others
and the ability of others to manipulate the innocent. Furthermore, the reader should recognize
evil within himself before it becomes destructive and he is "glad" to see his enemy dead, even
though he lured him to his death. The reader should ensure open communication and should
not nurture hatred or "wrath" or it will "grow."

Message

The message of the poem is that if we hold anger within and nurture it, it is poisonous and can
harm others. In the first verse, the narrator sets the stage for this message by stating that when
he is angry with someone and tells the person, his anger ceases. But when he keeps his anger
to himself, anger with "a foe" (line 3), his anger grows. While the narrator makes a
distinction in the poem between friend and foe, I think that this distinction is not all that
important in terms of human emotion, since anger held in can just as easily be toxic to friend
and foe.

As the poem goes on, the narrator uses the metaphor of a tree to show what happens to the
seed that begins as anger. He tends to the tree with fears, tears, false smiles, and "deceitful
wiles" (line 8). This is the narrator feeding his anger by holding onto it, rather than simply
letting it go. Ultimately, his anger bears fruit, the apple on the tree. When his foe sneaks into
the narrator's garden and eats the apple, he dies from its poison. Thus, the narrator's anger has
killed his foe.