A Poison Tree
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.And I water’d it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright;
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,And into my garden stole
When the night had veil’d the pole:
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretch’d beneath the tree.
William Blake
This seems rather simple on the surface as to what he is saying. Expressing your anger allows it to dissipate. Holding it in only allows it to grow until you grow a poison tree which bears a fruit that slays your foe.
Dyer believes this just goes to show you must express your feelings of anger with whoever you’re angry with so the anger doesn’t fester inside and destroy the relationship. He even says, “…is a very basic message for maintaining loving relationships through communication.”
I think it’s also a recipe for harnessing those feelings until you grow a poison apple. Blake differentiates between the two people he is angry at. One is a friend and so receives a different action from the one who is an enemy.
In those days as well as today, one usually doesn’t want a good relationship with an enemy. One wants to destroy an enemy, however unenlightened that attitude may be. This poem is a way of focusing emotion to do so.
And am I the only one who caught, cause it sure looks like Dyer didn’t (maybe because he’s much more enlightened than I), that it was the enemy who “into my garden stole” and stole the fruit and ate what wasn’t his. Perhaps that is a message not to take anything from someone who is angry at you and who maintains that anger. You sure don’t want to take actions to make the anger worse or you just might die from eating the poison apple.
And maybe that is another way to look at this poem. If I have an enemy who I have angered, I should do what I can to disperse that anger or he might nurture it into a poison tree. You sure don’t want to be planting booby-traps for yourself. So consider doing all you can to get the wrath out in the open and get it to end.
3 responses so far ↓
1 The King // Oct 9, 2007 at 7:00 pm
I don’t know. How do you exactly “release your anger” which actually hurting your enemy? In many cases, the enemy is not an enemy at all, just a person who has done something wrong.
2 Aspen // Oct 10, 2007 at 11:40 am
The way I understand it is you release your anger by telling your feelings to the person you are angry at. And the way you express it is by pointing to an incident not to the person.
The best example I can give is with a child who has done something he knows is wrong, against the rules. As a parent, you do become angry.
To release that anger, you tell the child you are angry about the act but not angry about him. The act itself, never the child if we are grown up enough to know this, is what we are angry at. The act, not the child, was bad in our eyes and we express that feeling.
So that’s where what you said about an enemy not being an enemy comes in. You need to be very grown up (we all have problems with that) and tell the person about your feelings. This can be very hard but if you have a relationship you want to maintain, it needs to be done in some fashion.
Then again as I said above, this poem contains a recipe for what to do if you do not want to maintain a good relationship.
3 The King // Oct 10, 2007 at 1:07 pm
Ah, the poem was about expressing your feelings in a positive way. I was thinking something completely different. In that case, yes we should express our feelings but as you mentioned, doing so in the proper Fashion is what’s important.
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