In “A Poison Tree,” William Blake depicts the negative states of bitterness and covetousness that he associates with man’s fallen state in the material world. He reinforces this idea of corruption by reworking the Biblical image of the Garden of Eden to his own ends.
Friend vs. Foe
The poem opens with its narrator contrasting his treatment of his friend and his foe. When he becomes angry with his friend, he speaks openly to the friend about his anger, and so brings their dispute to a quick resolution.
But with his foe, matters are different: “I was angry with my foe;/I told it not, my wrath did grow.” In these lines, Blake counters the ideal vision of freedom of emotional expression and exchange with the unhealthy alternative, and the remainder of the poem illustrates why this second path is destructive.
Disruption of Natural Cycles
The open communication of the narrator’s anger to his friend allowed him to abandon it, but keeping his anger towards his foe inside causes him to nurture it: “And I waterd it in fears,/Night & morning with my tears.” Unable to let go, he becomes obsessed with his anger, and in tending it, he disrupts the natural cycles of existence.
Ordinarily in Blake’s poetry, the sun and daytime have positive connotations, while the night is associated with the less pleasant aspects of the human soul. But the narrator upends this familiar order by maintaining his anger through night and day.
He also deceives his foe through false kindness, and the image Blake uses to describe his behavior continues the inversion of the natural order: “And I sunned it with smiles,/And with soft deceitful wiles.” Likening his deception to the sun’s role in the growth of plants only emphasizes the degree to which the narrator has deceived himself.
The Poisoned Apple
As a result of these ministrations, the poison tree “grew both day and night/Till it bore an apple bright.” The choice of an apple is an obvious parallel with the popular conception of the fruit of the tree in the Garden of Eden, and as such is clearly a corrupting influence.
In due course, the apple’s presence introduces more negative emotions into the scenario: “And my foe beheld it shine,/And he knew that it was mine.” Desiring to possess what his enemy owns for himself, the narrator’s foe sneaks into the garden under cover of darkness to steal the apple.
His covetousness brings him to an inglorious end, as the next morning he is “outstretchd beneath the tree.” Even though the narrator does not partake of the apple himself, by this point he has become entirely twisted by his hatred: he professes himself “glad” to see that his foe is dead.
A Helpless Self-Awareness
While Blake does not editorialize in “A Poison Tree,” presenting its events solely from the point of view of his narrator, the words strongly suggest that the narrator is aware of the wrongness of his actions and the path that he has chosen. But this self-awareness does nothing to prevent him from descending further into the pit of his own hatred.
Taken in the context of the Songs of Experience, Blake’s own perspective is clear even without any explicit statement. The narrator falls because he does not treat his foe the same as his friend. “A Poison Tree” is yet another expression of Blake’s ideal of universal love, simply expressed by way of a negative example.
Paul Brown - Paul Ferrell Brown graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1994 with a B.A. in English literature, and completed his M.A. in ...
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