Wrath as Something Belonging to

¶ … wrath as something belonging to someone else. We want to think of ourselves as a people capable of controlling our emotions because we are human. William Blake forces us to look at the truth of this supposition, however, in the poem "A Poison Tree." With this poem, we see how easy it is to become attached to our negative motions, such as anger and wrath. He points out how we become hypocrites because we allow ourselves to feed these kinds of emotions.

The sad truth about the heart of man emerges in Blke's poem. In the poem, the speaker uses anger as a tool to express the power of human emotion. The speaker's anger is fed and nurtured like a gardener would nurture a fruit tree. The comparison is realistic, due to the speaker's use of imagery. We see the speaker watering the soil and we see the tree growing "both day and night" (Blake 9). It bears a bright, shiny apple to tempt the enemy.

The most disturbing image is of the enemy "outstretched beneath the tree" (16). The imagery allows the reader to see how anger grows out of control. In "A Poison Tree," the tree is also a symbol of hypocrisy we find with mankind. Many of the things we find beautiful are not good for us, as the speaker's foe demonstrates. The tree is also like the speaker's anger in that it grows and grows. When we think of tress, we think of large plants towering over us.

This indicates how anger can become bigger than we are. Sometimes, it is attractive to us, like a shiny apple because we yield to our base instincts. In our humanity, we tend to feed such emotions, just as the speaker of the poems suns his tree with "smiles" (7). The wrath does not end but feeds on negativity. "A Poison Tree" is a mental exercise. The scene of this poem is more significant than anything else because it never leaves the speaker's mind. This poem is about murder.

However, it is not the kind of murder we might see on CSI. Instead, this murder takes place within the heart of the speaker. In his soul, where he is completely honest, he allows his enemy to consume the deadly fruit, much like Satan did in the Garden of Eden. Here we see the danger of anger. The tone of this poem is somber, which seems odd when coupled with the sing-song rhyme scheme. It wants to read like a nursery rhyme but its.