A Poison Tree by William Blake
- Musleh Saadi
- 14 hours ago
- 9 min read
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 waterd 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 veild the pole;
In the morning glad I see;
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
William Blake's "A Poison Tree," published in 1794 as part of Songs of Experience, stands as one of the most psychologically penetrating poems of the Romantic era. In sixteen deceptively simple lines, Blake constructs a devastating allegory of suppressed anger that anticipates Freudian psychology by over a century while embodying the Romantic movement's preoccupation with authentic emotion and its critique of societal repression. This analysis examines how Blake's poem operates simultaneously as moral fable, psychological case study, and indictment of the emotional falseness that he perceived in contemporary society.
Blake composed "A Poison Tree" during a period of intense political and social upheaval. The poem appeared in the same collection that gave us "The Tyger" and "London," works that collectively represented Blake's mature vision of a fallen world where natural human impulses become corrupted by institutions and false consciousness. Written in the aftermath of the French Revolution and during Britain's reactionary response to it, Blake's Songs of Experience offered a darker counterpoint to his earlier Songs of Innocence (1789), charting humanity's journey from pastoral simplicity to complex, often corrupted experience.
The Romantic movement, which flourished from roughly 1785 to 1830, privileged emotion over reason, individual experience over social convention, and natural expression over artificial restraint. Blake, though often considered a precursor to or outsider within mainstream Romanticism, embodied these values with particular intensity. His contemporaries Wordsworth, Coleridge, and later Shelley and Keats would explore emotion and imagination, but Blake's focus on the psychological consequences of emotional repression was uniquely prescient. While Wordsworth celebrated "emotion recollected in tranquility," Blake warned of emotions denied and festering in darkness.
It's worth noting that while the Victorian era (1837-1901) postdated Blake's death in 1827, Victorian poets would inherit and transform Romantic concerns. Tennyson's explorations of grief, Browning's dramatic monologues revealing psychological complexity, and the Pre-Raphaelites' revival of Blake's visual and poetic style all demonstrate continuities with Blake's psychological realism. However, "A Poison Tree" belongs firmly to the Romantic period, representing that movement's most radical interrogation of emotional authenticity.
The poem's central theme the toxic nature of suppressed anger operates on multiple registers. Blake presents wrath not as inherently destructive but as becoming poisonous through concealment and cultivation. The opening couplet establishes this thesis with stark clarity: "I was angry with my friend; / I told my wrath, my wrath did end." Here, honest expression leads to resolution. The contrasting couplet follows immediately: "I was angry with my foe: / I told it not, my wrath did grow." The choice to conceal anger from an enemy initiates the poem's dark trajectory.
This theme resonates with broader Romantic concerns about authenticity and the corrupting influence of social artifice. Blake's opposition between friend and foe suggests that enmity itself breeds dishonesty we cannot speak truthfully to those we perceive as enemies, and this failure of communication poisons both parties. The poem thus critiques not only individual psychological processes but also the social structures that create and perpetuate enmity.
The theme of cultivation anger as something nurtured like a plant introduces a perverse inversion of pastoral imagery. Where Romantic poets typically celebrated natural growth as inherently good, Blake shows how human intervention can corrupt even the natural process of emotional growth. The speaker "water'd it in fears, / Night & morning with my tears" and "sunned it with smiles, / And with soft deceitful wiles." This careful tending represents emotional labor directed toward destructive ends, a gardening of grievance that produces deadly fruit.
The apple that grows from this tree carries obvious biblical resonance, invoking the Fall of Man. Blake, who spent much of his career reinterpreting and challenging orthodox Christianity, uses this symbolism to suggest that human evil stems not from original sin but from emotional repression and deceit. The fall here is psychological and social rather than metaphysical humanity creates its own poison trees through false relationships and suppressed feelings.
The poem's conclusion "In the morning glad I see; / My foe outstretch'd beneath the tree" presents perhaps Blake's most disturbing psychological insight: the speaker's gladness at his enemy's destruction. This emotion reveals that the cultivation of wrath has corrupted the speaker as thoroughly as it has poisoned the foe. The poem becomes a double tragedy, showing how both parties suffer when honest emotional expression is abandoned.
Blake's formal choices reinforce the poem's thematic concerns with remarkable precision. The poem consists of four quatrains in regular iambic tetrameter with an AABB rhyme scheme. This nursery-rhyme simplicity creates an unsettling contrast with the dark psychological material, much as Blake's "The Tyger" uses childlike questions to address metaphysical horror. The singsong quality suggests both the fable-like nature of the narrative and the insidious ease with which we cultivate destructive emotions.
The extended metaphor of the tree structures the entire poem, transforming abstract psychological process into concrete narrative. Blake's genius lies in maintaining this metaphor consistently while allowing it multiple valences. The tree is simultaneously the anger itself, the relationship with the foe, and the speaker's corrupted psyche. The agricultural imagery watering, sunning, growing makes the abstract process of nursing a grudge viscerally tangible.
Blake's use of anaphora in the first stanza ("I was angry... I told") emphasizes the parallelism and contrast between the two scenarios, while the repetition of "I" throughout the poem centers the reader's attention on the speaker's agency and responsibility. This is not anger that happens to the speaker but anger that the speaker actively cultivates.
The symbolism of night and morning structures the poem temporally while suggesting psychological states. The speaker waters the tree with tears "Night & morning," suggesting that the grudge occupies both conscious and unconscious life. The enemy comes to steal the apple "When the night had veild the pole," indicating deception, unconsciousness, or perhaps the Romantic fascination with darkness as a realm of hidden truth. The final morning brings not enlightenment but the grim satisfaction of revenge accomplished.
The apple itself functions as a multivalent symbol. Beyond the biblical allusion, it represents the apparent attractiveness of the speaker's false friendship the foe "knew that it was mine" yet still reaches for it, suggesting how the appearance of something desirable masks its poison. The apple might also symbolize the speaker's deceit itself, a temptation that the foe cannot resist despite its danger.
Blake's diction deserves attention for its controlled ambiguity. "Soft deceitful wiles" compresses multiple meanings—the softness suggesting both gentleness and weakness, the deceit operating on both the foe and the speaker himself (who deceives himself about his true feelings), and "wiles" connoting both cunning and charm. Similarly, "stole" in "into my garden stole" suggests both theft and stealth, implying that the foe acts wrongly while also evoking the secrecy that has characterized the entire relationship.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, "A Poison Tree" provides a remarkably clear allegory of repression and the return of the repressed. Freud wouldn't publish his foundational works until a century after Blake's poem, yet Blake intuited the basic mechanism: emotions denied conscious expression don't disappear but instead grow more powerful and destructive in the unconscious. The watering with tears "Night & morning" suggests how repressed content haunts both waking and sleeping life, while the eventual eruption in the form of the poison apple represents the return of the repressed in catastrophic form.
The poem also illuminates what Freud would later call "reaction formation" the defense mechanism whereby unacceptable feelings are transformed into their opposite. The speaker's "smiles" and "soft deceitful wiles" represent the false friendliness that masks hostility. This duplicity corrupts authentic relationships, creating a social world where true feelings remain hidden and communication becomes impossible.
From the perspective of moral philosophy, the poem engages with questions about the ethics of emotional expression and the responsibility we bear for cultivating our feelings. Blake suggests that emotions are not simply states that happen to us but states we actively create through our choices about expression and suppression. The speaker's gladness at the foe's death indicates a loss of moral sense that results from emotional dishonesty.
The poem resonates with virtue ethics, particularly Aristotle's concept of habituation—we become what we repeatedly do. The speaker who repeatedly waters and suns his wrath becomes, ultimately, a person capable of taking joy in another's death. Blake thus presents emotional cultivation as a matter of character development, with suppressed anger breeding not just psychological disturbance but genuine moral corruption.
Blake's radical theology also informs the poem's meaning. Throughout his career, Blake challenged orthodox Christianity's emphasis on guilt, obedience, and the mortification of natural desires. He distinguished between what he called the vengeful God of institutional religion and the true divine principle of forgiveness and creative energy. "A Poison Tree" critiques the religious and social teachings that encourage people to suppress natural anger rather than addressing its causes honestly. The biblical imagery of the apple becomes ironic the "sin" here is not the pride or disobedience of Eden but the emotional repression and deceit that society demands.
Within Blake's own corpus, "A Poison Tree" pairs meaningfully with its "innocent" counterpart in Songs of Innocence. While no direct parallel exists, poems like "The Divine Image" celebrate qualities like "Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love" that represent honest emotional expression. The movement from Innocence to Experience in Blake's work often involves the discovery that social institutions corrupt natural virtue—"A Poison Tree" shows this corruption operating at the intimate level of personal relationships.
The poem also resonates with Blake's longer prophetic works, particularly "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" (1790-1793), where Blake argues that "Energy is Eternal Delight" and that the suppression of desire leads to corruption. The speaker in "A Poison Tree" denies his energetic anger honest expression, channeling it instead into the perverse energy of cultivated revenge.
Comparing "A Poison Tree" with Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" (1797) or "Christabel" (1797-1800) reveals different Romantic approaches to psychological darkness. Where Coleridge's supernatural horrors operate in dream-like, symbolic landscapes, Blake's horror emerges from realistic psychological process. The poison tree grows not in Xanadu but in an ordinary garden; the monster is not Geraldine but the speaker himself.
Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" (1798), written just four years after "A Poison Tree," offers an instructive contrast. Wordsworth finds in nature and memory sources of consolation and continuity; Blake finds in the garden of the mind the seeds of murder. Both poets value authenticity, but where Wordsworth seeks transcendence, Blake diagnoses pathology.
Later poets would engage similar themes of repressed emotion with different emphases. Tennyson's "Maud" (1855) explores obsessive anger and its psychological consequences at much greater length, while Browning's dramatic monologues like "My Last Duchess" (1842) reveal speakers whose controlled, polite discourse barely conceals murderous rage. These Victorian works inherit Blake's psychological insight while embedding it in more socially specific contexts.
Emily Brontë's poetry, particularly "No Coward Soul Is Mine" (1846), shares Blake's fierce individualism and rejection of orthodox morality, though her focus remains more metaphysical than psychological. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, especially Dante Gabriel Rossetti, would revive interest in Blake's visual art and poetry in the mid-Victorian period, drawn to his symbolic intensity and his challenge to conventional morality.
"A Poison Tree" endures as one of Blake's most accessible yet profound psychological poems, a work that compressed into sixteen lines insights that would occupy psychoanalysis, moral philosophy, and social criticism for centuries to come. The poem's genius lies in its structural simplicity—the clear metaphor, the regular meter, the nursery-rhyme quality—which makes its psychological complexity all the more striking. Blake demonstrates that the most devastating insights can be communicated with the clearest language, that moral and psychological truth need not be obscure.
The poem's significance within literary history rests on several achievements. First, it represents the Romantic movement's most penetrating analysis of emotional repression, anticipating by decades the psychological realism that would emerge in Victorian literature and by a century the formal mechanisms of psychoanalysis. Second, it exemplifies Blake's unique position within Romanticism—more radical than Wordsworth, more psychologically acute than Coleridge, more accessible than his own prophetic books. Third, it demonstrates how symbolic narrative can function as rigorous psychological and moral analysis, a technique that would influence poetry and fiction throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Thematically, "A Poison Tree" continues to resonate because it addresses a perennial human challenge: how to handle anger honestly without becoming destructive, how to maintain authentic relationships in a world that often requires social masks, and how our choices about emotional expression shape our character. Blake's answer that suppressed anger becomes poison while expressed anger can be resolved remains controversial and relevant. The poem challenges contemporary therapeutic culture's emphasis on "processing" emotions while also critiquing the older ethic of suppression. Blake insists that resolution comes through honest communication with others, not private cultivation or management of feelings.
Ultimately, "A Poison Tree" exemplifies Blake's prophetic vision at its most concentrated. In the space of four quatrains, he diagnoses a fundamental pathology of human relationships, traces its psychological mechanism, and presents its tragic outcome with devastating clarity. The poem stands as both a warning and a challenge: we become what we nurture in ourselves, and the choice between authentic expression and poisonous cultivation remains, always, our own responsibility. The speaker's morning gladness at his foe's death represents not catharsis but damnation—the final fruit of a tree that should never have been planted, much less watered and sunned to such terrible fruition.
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