A poison Tree by William Blake

 

A Poison Tree

By William Blake

 

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 and 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 veild the pole;

In the morning glad I see;

My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

 

The poem is written by William Blake and it was first published in his ‘Songs of Experience’ in 1794. In language of the poem is very simple and easy. The speaker presents two approaches to anger. The first approach is giving an outlet to your anger and tell the person with whom you are angry. The second approach is keeping the anger within and feed it. The poem is an allegory for the dangers of bottling up emotions and how it begins a cycle of negativity.

 

Summary

 

The speaker says that he was angry with his friend. He told his friend about his anger and his anger subsided. On the other hand, when the speaker was angry with his enemy, he kept quiet. His anger increased with the passage of time.

The speaker nourished this anger with his fears and tears both day and night. The speaker’s smiles and other gentle deceptions used to hide this anger, only resulted in feeding that anger further.

The anger grew into a tree and bore a bright apple. The enemy of the speaker saw this bright apple and he knew it belonged to the speaker.

The enemy crept into the speaker’s garden in the darkness of the night. The next morning, the speaker became very happy to see his enemy lying dead beneath the apple tree.

 

 

Anger and Suppressed Emotion

In "A Poison Tree" the speaker presents a powerful argument against the suppression of anger. By clearly laying out the benefits of talking about anger, and the consequences of keeping negative emotions within, the poem implies to the reader that the suppression of anger is morally dangerous, leading only to more anger or even violence.

The speaker presents two distinct scenarios to illustrate the danger of suppressing anger. In the first two lines of the poem, the speaker describes admitting his or her "wrath" to a friend; as soon as the speaker does so, this “wrath” ends. Honesty and frankness, the speaker makes clear, causes anger to disappear.

By contrast, as described in lines 2 through lines 16 of the poem, the poem details the negative consequences of suppressed anger. In these lines, the speaker does not open up about being angry. Instead, the speaker actively tends to his or her wrath as if it were a garden, watering it with “fears” and “tears,” and “sunning” it with "smiles" and cunning deceit in a way that indicates a kind of morbid pleasure. The speaker’s careful cultivation of this rage-garden implies an inability to move on from whatever made the speaker angry in the first place, as well as the self-perpetuating nature of negative emotions; anger encourages fear, despair, and deceit—which, in turn, simply nourish more anger. The suppression of emotion thus begins a cycle of festering negativity that eventually takes on a life of its own. Through the growth of the tree and its poisonous apple, the repression of anger is shown to cause a chain reaction that makes the problem far worse than it would have been had the speaker and the "foe" just talked through their issues.

This poisonous growth contrasts with the simple way in which the anger was eliminated in the first scenario—when it was "told." Through this contrast, the poem makes clear a moral choice: either talk and find solutions, or keep quiet and enable the far-reaching, poisonous effects that come when people hold their angry emotions too close to the chest. Implicit in the poem, then, is the idea that the root of human conflict grows from the inability to find common ground through meaningful communication. The fact that, at the end of the poem, the speaker is "glad" to find the enemy lying dead beneath the tree shows the way in which, in the second scenario, the anger increasingly dominates the way the speaker sees other human beings—the speaker becomes a host for the growth of anger, which feeds on others' pain. The poem, then, suggests and warns against the fact that anger is an all-consuming emotion when allowed to grow unchecked.

The simplicity of the lines and the use of extended metaphor—the growth of the tree reflects the growth of the anger—also makes the message of the poem applicable well beyond the immediate conflict between the speaker and the foe. In fact, these two figures can be read as allegorical representations of different parts of humanity itself, showing the way that war and hatred develop from misplaced anger. This more general reading of the poem's moral message is further amplified by the clear allusion between the poison tree of the poem to the tree in the garden of Eden. The poem can therefore be read as an argument against the psychological suppression of anger on both the personal and even the societal level.

"A Poison Tree" ultimately makes a powerful argument in favour of opening up and trusting in the human capacity for empathy and understanding. The alternative, the poem argues, is far more dangerous.