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Summary
Summary
The speaker of the poem tells us that when he was angry with his friend he simply told his friend that he was annoyed, and that put an end to his bad feeling. Later, when he was angry with his enemy, he didn’t air his grievance to this foe, and so his anger grew. Whereas we can trust our friends with our true feelings and be honest with them, a foe is someone who – almost by definition – we cannot be so honest with.
In the second stanza, Blake turns to the central, title metaphor of his poem, likening his anger to a tree that he ‘watered’ with fear and resentment. Then, more curiously, he says that the false ‘smiles’ he put on whenever he saw his enemy acted like sunlight helping a tree to grow. By bottling up his anger, he made it worse and the tree grew faster and became poisonous. He smiles at his enemy while, all the while, he is (inwardly and secretly) plotting his revenge.
In this third stanza, an apple sprouts from this poison tree of anger. This ‘apple bright’ attracts the attention of his enemy, who then sneaked into the speaker’s garden one night and ate the apple from this tree; when the speaker finds his enemy the next morning, his foe is lying dead under the tree, having eaten the poisoned fruit
A Reading of A Poison Tree
A Reading of A Poison Tree
Context
Context
William Blake
Blake was born in 1757 and was originally an engraver. He began adding text to his engravings in the form of poems and he was interested as much in the presentation of poems as the poems themselves.
In 1789, he published an illustrated set of poems called Songs of Innocence and in 1793 followed this with Songs of Experience (from which A Poison Tree comes).
In 1790, he combined these two sets of poems, publishing as Songs of Innocence and Experience Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.
The first set of poems, Songs of Innocence, is generally hopeful and positive while the second set, Songs of Experience, tends to be more negative and pessimistic.
Blake was a deeply religious man and this shows in the moral nature of his work and religious imagery in A Poison Tree.
His poetry was not really well-regarded during his own life though today he is regarded as a man ahead of his time and is now thought of as a major poetic writer.
Blake is heavily regarded as one of the major players within the Romantic literary movement.
The Romanics
Romanticism was an intellectual and artistic movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century. It was a reactionary response against the scientific rationalisation of nature during the Enlightenment, commonly expressed in literature, music, painting and drama.
Romanticism was also a response to the rapid expansion of industry as a result of the impending Industrial Revolution.
To the Romantics, nature was the most powerful force so they took issue with the factory system of mass production which was centred on processes that used and controlled natural forces such as water and wind, but also increased power by increasingly using fossil fuels.
Romantics viewed the exploitation of natural resources for industry as degrading and wrongful.
Nature as a powerful force always remains a centric theme in all Romantic pieces of art and literature.
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above a Sea of Fog (c. 1818)
This image is probably one of the most famous romantic paintings. It illustrates the sublime, so popular with Romantic artists and associated with emotions of greatness and founded on awe and terror. At the same time it shows the glories of nature and landscape that open up during long walks in the hills and mountains. This theme features heavily in English Romantic literature and poetry.
But the painting is also the very icon of the alienation from nature experience by urban dwellers of industrial cities. It depicts the wanderer as a stranger in nature, but at the same time as a conqueror of nature. The contradictions in this painting show the complexity of Romantic art.
"I have said before that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin in emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind."
William Wordsworth (a fellow Romantic poet), 1798
On discussing his views of poetry and Romanticism
Guided Annotation
Guided Annotation
Annotations & Notes
Annotations & Notes
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