Blog Post #17

A Poison Tree By William Blake

The first time I read this poem the first stanza really stood out to me. It made me think of when you don’t talk to someone and you just get more and more mad. The first 2 lines in stanza 1 pretty much talks about how he is angry with a friend, he tells his friends about his anger and now he is happy again. Then in the last 2 lines of the 1st stanza the scenario changes and now he is angry with a foe but doesn't tell him so he just gets angrier and angrier. Now we go to the 2nd stanza, in this stanza he treats him anger almost like a plant. We see this when he uses figurative language such as " And I watered it in fears". As a plant grows it needs sunshine to survive, in this stanza smiles is representative of the sun. In this stanza we see the author compare growing of life(plant) and the growing of anger and I thought that was odd. Now we go to the 3rd stanza where we see his anger growing and growing until it turns into an apple. Now what does the apple represent? I say it represents happiness, the author is slowly getting happier. Lastly the 4th stanza, the first line of this stanza we see the enemy understands that the author is mad. One word that really stood out to me was "stole". This word is in the past tense form and I think there is significant meaning. It's almost like the stealing had happened previously. Lastly the word, "glad" interested me because is the author saying he is glad for my his enemy or is it more of a happy morning where he happens to see his enemy lying beneath a tee. I feel the overall theme for this poem is Anger. The one line that I think sums it all up is " I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end." Overall this poem is about getting over anger with each other.