Poems: A Poison Tree

Description

Blake crafts a deceptively simple narrative that reveals the dark psychology of repressed rage and calculated revenge. Through the metaphor of a poisonous tree grown from a seed of anger, he shows how emotions, when buried rather than confronted, can transform into something monstrous. The poem's nursery-rhyme simplicity belies its sophisticated exploration of human darkness—how a speaker moves from ordinary anger to premeditated murder through careful cultivation of hatred. Each stanza traces this deadly gardening: the initial seed of wrath, its careful tending through false smiles and soft deceit, until it bears its fatal fruit. Blake's genius lies in how he uses the innocent language of garden-tending to describe the deliberate nurturing of murderous intent, creating one of literature's most powerful examinations of how unresolved anger corrupts the soul that harbors it.