A Poison Tree — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
A Poison Tree
The poems
What you need to know
The speaker's anger at a friend ends once he speaks it, but his anger at an enemy, hidden and fed in secret, grows into a tree whose shining apple tempts the enemy into his garden and to his death.
How Blake's extended metaphor turns hidden anger into a poisonous tree, fed by tears, false smiles and deceit, and how the apple and the garden recall the Bible's story of the Fall.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I was angry with my friend', 'my wrath did grow', 'And I water'd it in fears', 'And with soft deceitful wiles', 'Till it bore an apple bright', 'And he knew that it was mine', 'When the night had veil'd the pole', 'My foe outstretch'd beneath the tree'.
Form: four quatrains of rhyming couplets in short, mostly trochaic lines, with the repeated And driving the anger on step by step, and a last couplet that jumps to the morning and the dead foe.
Context: William Blake (1757–1827), poet, painter and printmaker, who printed and coloured his own books; Songs of Experience, joined with Songs of Innocence in 1794 to show two contrary states of the human soul; the poem's first title, Christian Forbearance; and the Bible's story of the Fall, in which a forbidden fruit brings death.
Compares well with: Cousin Kate (bitterness and betrayal), The Man He Killed (what makes someone a foe), Catrin (conflict in a close relationship) and Extract from The Prelude (guilt and inner conflict).
