Literature Library study guide
A Poison Tree
In four tightly rhymed stanzas, Blake turns hidden anger into a tree that bears a beautiful but deadly result.
- Literary form
- Poem
- First published
- 1794
- Literary period
- British Romanticism
- Region / tradition
- England
- Original language
- English
What happens in this work?
The speaker begins by comparing two responses to anger. When angry with a friend, the speaker speaks openly, and the feeling ends. When angry with an enemy, however, the speaker keeps silent. That unspoken anger does not stay still; it grows stronger. The poem’s first lesson is simple but serious: refusing to address anger can give it more power.
The middle of the poem develops an extended metaphor. The speaker treats resentment as though it were a living tree, feeding it with fear, sadness, flattering behavior, and deception. The tree eventually produces an attractive apple. The enemy sees the fruit, enters the speaker’s garden at night, and is found dead beneath the tree the next morning.
The ending is deliberately unsettling. The speaker says they are glad to find the enemy dead, so the poem does not offer an easy moral victory. Blake makes readers confront both the enemy’s desire for what is not theirs and the speaker’s responsibility for cultivating a trap. The poem shows how anger can become harmful when it is hidden and deliberately nourished.
What was happening when it was written?
Blake placed the poem in Songs of Experience, the darker companion to Songs of Innocence. His illuminated books joined engraved words with hand-colored images, so a poem was meant to be encountered as both language and artwork. A Metropolitan Museum copy identifies “A Poison Tree” as plate 49 and explains that Blake etched the Songs of Experience plates in 1794; later copies could look visually different because he printed and colored them over many years. Reading the poem as an “experience” poem helps explain its distrust of simple appearances: a shining fruit and a smiling face conceal danger.
Who matters, and why?
The speaker
The speaker is not a neutral observer or merely a victim. After concealing anger toward a foe, the speaker actively sustains it through fearful thoughts, tears, smiles, and deceit. The final reaction reveals a troubling emotional investment in the foe’s destruction. Blake therefore asks readers to judge the speaker’s choices, not only the enemy’s actions.
The friend
The friend appears only at the poem’s beginning, yet this brief relationship establishes the alternative path. Speaking honestly ends the anger in that case. The friend is important less as a fully developed character than as evidence that communication can interrupt resentment before it becomes a lasting conflict.
The foe
The foe is defined by opposition and by an action at the end: entering the speaker’s garden to take the tempting fruit. That action can make the foe seem blameworthy, but Blake supplies almost no background. This lack of detail keeps attention on the speaker’s cultivated revenge and prevents the reader from treating death as uncomplicated justice.
Big ideas to track
Suppressed anger becomes destructive
The poem traces a clear chain of cause and effect: anger that is expressed to a friend ends, while anger withheld from an enemy grows. Blake does not portray resentment as a private feeling with private consequences. Once tended over time, it becomes an outward force capable of harming another person and corrupting the person who holds it.
Appearance can hide intention
The speaker’s outward behavior is gentle and pleasant, but the poem shows that this surface is a disguise. Likewise, the fruit’s attractiveness masks its danger. These linked appearances make the garden feel less like a peaceful natural setting than a carefully prepared trap, where beauty has been turned into an instrument of revenge.
Shared responsibility and moral discomfort
The foe chooses to enter the garden and take the fruit, but the speaker has deliberately created the conditions for that choice. The final satisfaction is especially disturbing because it shows revenge has not healed the speaker. Blake leaves readers with a moral tension: wrongdoing by one person does not erase the destructive choices of another.
How the writing works
Extended metaphor
Blake makes anger into a tree that can be watered, warmed, grown, and made fruitful. This metaphor gives an invisible emotion a physical life cycle. It also changes the meaning of cultivation: actions that normally suggest care and growth become sinister because they help resentment mature into a deadly result.
Simple songlike rhyme and rhythm
The poem uses short lines and regular, strongly rhymed couplets. Its almost nursery-rhyme smoothness makes the narrative easy to follow, but that simplicity clashes with betrayal and death. The contrast matters because Blake shows that dangerous moral habits can develop through ordinary, repeated actions rather than dramatic public violence.
Parallel structure and contrast
The opening presents two closely matched situations—anger toward a friend and anger toward a foe—then gives opposite outcomes. This parallel design makes the speaker’s decisive difference unmistakable: open speech in one relationship, secrecy in the other. The later garden scene becomes the consequence of that early choice.
Moments to notice while you read
Opening four lines
What to notice: Notice how the nearly identical situations change because the speaker communicates with one person but stays silent with the other.
Why it matters: This compact comparison provides the poem’s central argument and prepares readers to view everything afterward as the result of a chosen response to anger.
Beginning of the second stanza
What to notice: Track the kinds of emotional nourishment the speaker gives resentment, including fear, grief, false friendliness, and deliberate manipulation.
Why it matters: The details show that the anger is not accidental or uncontrollable; it is repeatedly maintained until it becomes part of the speaker’s behavior.
End of the second stanza
What to notice: Pay attention to the shift from emotional language to the image of a tree producing an unusually appealing piece of fruit.
Why it matters: The fruit makes hidden resentment visible and tempting, connecting the speaker’s inward hostility to a danger that can draw another person in.
Third stanza
What to notice: Notice that the foe recognizes the fruit as belonging to the speaker before secretly entering the garden during darkness.
Why it matters: This moment complicates blame: the foe acts knowingly and dishonestly, yet the setting and temptation have already been created by the speaker.
Final couplet
What to notice: Focus on the speaker’s pleased response to the foe’s body beneath the tree rather than assuming the ending celebrates justice.
Why it matters: The blunt emotional response exposes revenge as morally damaging. Instead of resolving anger, the ending leaves the speaker associated with death and satisfaction.
Questions to test your understanding
Answer in your own words. Then point to a specific moment in the work that supports your answer.
- Why does Blake include the brief example of anger resolved with a friend before telling the longer story about the foe?
- How do fear, tears, smiles, and deceit each contribute differently to the growth of the speaker’s symbolic tree?
- What does the attractive fruit suggest about the relationship between temptation, appearance, and revenge in the poem?
- How does the foe’s nighttime entry into the garden affect your judgment of the foe without removing the speaker’s responsibility?
- Why might Blake use a cheerful, regular rhyme pattern to tell a story that ends in death?
- Does the speaker’s gladness at the end show triumph, moral failure, emotional numbness, or more than one of these? Use details from the poem’s structure.
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