With a consistent rhyme scheme, the poem flows as a story in both structure and content. The poem is divided into four stanzas of four lines each. The opening stanza acts as an introduction while the second and third stanzas establish the body of the story and a simple plot. Finally, the last stanza contains the climax and conclusion of the story.

The first stanza serves as the introduction of the story. It introduces the characters and begins to develop the scene for events later in the poem. The poem opens with the speaker stating his anger with a friend: “I was angry with my friend”. The speaker then expresses this anger to his friend: “I told my wrath, my wrath did end”. By communicating his feelings, the speaker overcomes the anger and possibly preserves the friendship.

The speaker forms the repressed emotion from his anger and wrath into a tree. Blake uses imagery of watering and sunning this tree with “tears,” “smiles,” and “soft deceitful wiles”. Through this imagery, the speaker mentally cultivates the tree of wrath from his hostility and deceit towards his enemy causing it to grow, until it forms an “apple bright”.

At this point, Blake deviates from the idea of surrendering to emotion; instead, the speaker uses restrained emotion to attain an end result of overcoming an enemy. This deviation begins when the speaker becomes angry with a foe, “I was angry with my foe”; however, this time the speaker does not express that anger, and because of this, the anger grows more intense, “I told it not, my wrath did grow”.

Blake exemplifies the use of restrained wrath to grow into a poison tree, which bears fruit, to attract an enemy to his death. It is important to remember that these images of the fruit and the tree existed only within the speaker’s mind, and yet they were strong enough to tempt an enemy to his death. This exemplifies Blake’s strong belief in the power of mind and thought, a belief common to the Romantic Period.

Blake may also have been suggesting a negative reflection on God’s tree of knowledge

Some topics in this essay:
Period Blake, Adam Eve, William Blake, Romantic Period, Garden Eden, tree knowledge, poison tree, Poison Tree, tree wrath, story tree knowledge, William Blake’s, story tree, adam eve, tree blake, “i told wrath, “i angry, told wrath, “i told, restrained emotion, anger friend “i,