Skip to main content

What is "A Poison Tree" about? What is the poet trying to convey?

“The Poison Tree” is a poem about the evil effects of holding anger in. The premise is introduced in the first stanza, in which the poet explains



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.



The rest of the poem uses language that suggests the story of the Garden of Eden and the fall of man from the Bible to show how nurturing bad feelings can be harmful. The “wrath” that is not told grows and grows until it bears “fruit,” an “apple bright” which tempts his foe and kills him when he eats it (“In the morning glad I see; / My foe outstretched beneath the tree”).


I think Blake is getting at two things here. First, the untold anger leads to the “death” of the foe—in other words, the end of their relationship. Second, and more importantly, is the poet’s “gladness” at seeing his enemy defeated; in harboring the hatred, the poet has turned himself into the serpent in the Garden of Eden story, an agent of destruction, and one who takes delight in harming others. Ultimately the person most harmed by “the poison tree” is the one who created it in the first place.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A man has a garden measuring 84 meters by 56 meters. He divides it into the minimum number of square plots. What is the length of the square plots?

We wish to divide this man's garden into the minimum number of square plots possible. A square has all four sides with the same length.Our garden is a rectangle, so the answer is clearly not 1 square plot. If we choose the wrong length for our squares, we may end up with missing holes or we may not be able to fit our squares inside the garden. So we have 84 meters in one direction and 56 meters in the other direction. When we start dividing the garden in square plots, we are "filling" those lengths in their respective directions. At each direction, there must be an integer number of squares (otherwise, we get holes or we leave the garden), so that all the square plots fill up the garden nicely. Thus, our job here is to find the greatest common divisor of 84 and 56. For this, we prime factor both of them: `56 = 2*2*2*7` `84 = 2*2*3*7` We can see that the prime factors and multiplicities in common are `2*2*7 = 28` . This is the desired length of the square plots. If you wi...
Post a Comment
Read more