"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 water’d 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.
In My Own Words:
When I was angry with a friend of mine, I told them about it, and then I felt better. But, when I became angry with my enemy, I kept it to myself, and the feeling grew like a tree. I saw their every action as a reason I should be afraid of them, I cried over the pain they caused me, but all the while I smiled to their face and did everything to make them think I didn’t hate them. All of these actions were like water, nourishing the growing tree of anger. So the tree grew and grew until it bore an apple. My enemy saw the apple, and how brightly it shone, and he knew that it was my apple. My enemy snuck into my garden in the middle of the night to eat my apple, and in the morning, I was happy to see my enemy stretched out, dead, beneath the tree.
I don’t love didactic verse, but I love A Poison Tree.
Didactic verse is not technically poetry. It usually rhymes, but it is far more concerned with teaching or preaching than with poetic excellence. When the moral lesson of a piece supersedes its freshness of language, its communication of a human experience, and its originality, the piece ceases to be poetry and instead becomes didactic verse.
This is not to say that didactic verse is bad. It can serve a valuable purpose. Take, for example, one of my family’s favorite sayings at bedtime: “Early to bed, early to rise, Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Having catchy sayings that encapsulate pieces of wisdom is good. It’s just… Not poetic. And that’s okay.
This is not to say that poetic excellence and morals cannot go hand-in-hand. Which brings me to A Poison Tree.
William Blake’s poem is certainly one that carries a moral message about the dangers of nursing animosity. However, the poetic excellence of the piece does not play second fiddle to the moral. Rather, both are bound up together in an integrated whole, communicating not only the moral of the story, but also evoking intense feelings of discomfort and foreboding.
Perhaps the most sinister of the lines is, “And he knew that it was mine.” Through simple language, Blake conveys the shameless evil of the speaker, who has so far corrupted himself as to be glad that his poisoned apple has killed his enemy. The speaker justifies his evil here by implying that the enemy deserved his fate because he knew he was stealing.
Part of what makes this poem great, too, is the blending of reality and fantasy. In the first stanza, we see a completely realistic and relatable presentation of facts: When I told my friend I was angry, I felt better, but when I kept my anger to myself in regards to my foe, it got worse.
Then, Blake introduces the metaphor of the anger growing like a tree, and in the following two stanzas, the metaphorical becomes reality, and the poison apple kills the enemy. It is this blurring of lines that makes the poem both disturbing and brilliant.
While not all poems have morals, and the ones that do can run the risk of being not entirely poetic, A Poison Tree is an example of a great poem that is both moral and poetic.