"A Poison Tree"

Edward C. Sampson's 1948 reading of "The Poison Tree" interprets the poem as a balance of innocence (the speaker's relationship with the friend) and experience (the speaker's relationship with the foe). Sampson also interprets Blake as God and the poison apple as the apple, or the forbidden fruit.

Henry Coombes discusses both innocence and experience in the poem as he points out the two different ways that "poetic thought" functions, examining the ambiguity in both its "prose meaning" and its "poetic meaning" (1953). Coombes addresses the ambiguity (and irony) of an honest confession of deceit and of a "vision" being related with such "clarity and definiteness."

Robert F. Gleckner offers a another reading emphasizing the deceit in the Poem. Gleckner compares "The Poison Tree" to "The Human Abstract" pointing out the "fruit of deceit" that appears in both poems. Gleckner also posits the self-deification of the speaker and his ultimate hypocrisy, which is, for Blake, "the only kind of evil."

Hazard Adams also focuses on the evil of the speaker in his 1963 reading of "The Poison Tree" in which the speaker is construed as a Satan-like character who has constructed a "perverse Eden" and unwittingly defiled it through devoting himself to an "abstract."

E.D. Hirsch points out the contrast between the simplicity of the language and the complexity of the ideas that it expresses and implies (1964). Hirsch also discusses the ironic contrast between the use of a natural metaphor (the tree) to express an unnatural phenomenon (repression of anger). Hirsh points out that Blake uses this same technique in "The Human Abstract," a poem with a similarly fallen speaker and suggests that the speaker in "A Poison Tree" can be compared to the sick rose and to the speaker in "The Angel": they are all unaware of their sickness.

Kathleen Raine proposes that this sickness is caused by "Christian forbearance" (the original title of the poem) which is actually repressed wrath (1968). Raine cites parallels between the God of Genesis and the speaker in the poem (both conceal their wrath in trees).

Robert Mikkelsen also addresses the original title of the poem in his discussion of the various manuscript changes in Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience pointing out the significance of the two changes Blake made to "A Poison Tree" in the Rossetti Manuscript: the change of the title and the rewriting of line 11. Mikkelsen asserts that these changes reflect Blake's decided opinion that insincerity and restraint are spreaders of "contagion."

Geoffrey Keynes also focuses on Blake's opinion of the dangers of insincerity and restraint and interprets the poem as a warning rather than as an exultation (1970). Keynes suggests that it be read in conjunction with the proverbs concerning repression in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. He also points out the poem's thematic similarities to a couplet Blake wrote in reference to his patron William Hayley: "Thy Friendship oft has made my heart to ake / Do be my Enemy for Friendship's sake."

Barbara F. Lefcowitz also analyzes the psychology of the speaker in "A Poison Tree." Lefcowitz offers a reading of "The Poison Tree" in which both the poem and the tree are manifestations of a pathology that Freud calls "the omnipotence of thought," which he defines as an "over-accentuation of psychical reality in comparison with material reality" (1972). Lefcowitz discusses the poet's and the speaker's subjective process of shaping their ideas into art and artifact, respectively.

W.H. Stevenson also explores the subjectivity and illogic of the poem (1973). Stevenson points out that both the poem and its illustration defy logic, and therefore the poem is to be taken by the reader for its overall effect and not read as a "step-by-step" narrative.

However, Phillip J. Gallagher discusses "The Poison Tree" as a narrative "counter-myth" to the biblical myth of the Fall to expose Original Sin as a fraud perpetrated by priests who "deified the kind of behavior exemplified by the narrator of 'A Poison Tree'" (1977). Gallagher discusses both formal and thematic links between the two myths comparing the biblical word becoming flesh with the speaker's anger becoming a tree. According to Gallagher's reading of the poem, "the creative potency of Hebrew God is nothing more than the destructive anger of a murderous villain" (247).

F. W. Bateson also discusses myth in the poem (1980). Bateson uses "A Poison Tree" to explore the use of "preliterary" or "subliterary" subject matter to make a symbolic statement--in this case, a statement about the hypocrisy of Christian forgiveness and charity. Bateson focuses on the two changes Blake made to the Rossetti Manuscript version of the poem to make his point that the power of the poem lies not in its use of myth, but rather in its ability to resist the schematization of myth-criticism. Bateson also refutes Hazard Adams' 1963 interpretation of the poem asserting that Adams fallaciously imposes Blake's late mythology on an early poem.

Heather Glen also discusses the hypocrisy of Christian forgiveness and charity as expressed in the poem. Glen offers a substantial reading of the poem as an exploration of the Swedenborgian idea of outward piety being a disguise for dark human "impulses" and discusses the influence of the Swedenborgian interpretation of Genesis in which "original sin" is replaced by "free will" (1983). Glen also suggests the influence of a popular eighteenth-century nursery rhyme on "A Poison Tree": "There was a man of double deed / Sowed his garden full of seed . . . ." She then discusses the popular late-eighteenth-century myth of "The Tree of Death" (the Upas tree of Java) as an influence. Glen concludes by pointing out that the ideas expressed in the poem prefigure certain Marxist ideas about alienation and nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories about schizophrenia.

In another substantial analysis of the poem, John Brenkman explores the influence of late-seventeenth-century politics and society (ie, the emergence of capitalism and bourgeois society) on the poetic language, or form, of Blake's "A Poison Tree." Brenkman argues that there are two contrary readings of the poem (one that views the poem as a confessional and one that interprets the poem as a recipe for vengeance). According to Brenkman, these two readings, one moral and the other amoral, "correspond to the two poles of ethical consciousness" through which individuals in a capitalist society relate to each other; the true meaning of the poem lies in this dialectic. Brenkman also suggests that any reading of the poem must also be informed by Blake's ideas of the possibility of socialist revolution.

David Lindsay interprets the speaker as "self-congratulatory" rather than confessional and offers a discussion of criticism through 1983.

--Lydia Whitt (November 1995)

Works Cited

Adams, Hazard. William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems. Seattle: U Washington P, 1963. 244.

Bateson, F.W. "Myth--A Dispensable Critical Term." The Binding of Proteus: Perspectives of Myth and the Literary Process. Ed. Charles Moorman. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1980. 98-109.

Brenkman, John. "The Concrete Utopia of Poetry: Blake's 'A Poison Tree'." Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism. Eds. Chavia Hosek and Patricia Parker. Ithica: Cornell UP, 1985. 182- 93.

Coombes, Henry ed. Literature and Criticism. London: Chatto, 1953. 93-96.

Gallagher, Philip J. "The Word Make Flesh: Blake's 'A Poison Tree' and the Book of Genesis." Studies in Romanticism 16 (Spring 1977): 237-49.

Gleckner, Robert F. The Piper and the Bard: A Study of William Blake. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1959.

Glen, Heather. Visions and Disenchantment: Blake's Songs and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. Cambridge: UP, 1983. 186-99.

Hirsch, E.D.Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake. Chicago: UP, 1964.

Keynes, Geoffrey. Commentary. Songs of Innocence and Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. By William Blake. 1789,1794. Oxford: UP, 1970. 152.

Lefcowitz, Barbara F. "Omnipotence of Thought and the Poetic Imagination: Blake, Coleridge, and Rilke." The Psychoanalytic Review 59.3 (1972): 417-32.

Lindsay, David W. Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989.

Mikkelsen, Robert. "William Blake's Revisions of The Songs of Innocence and of Experience." Concerning Poetry 2 (Fall 1969): 60-71.

Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. Vol. 2 Princeton: UP, 1968. 3 vols. 39.

Sampson, Edward C. "Blake's 'A Poison Tree'." Explicator VI (1948): Item 7.

Stevenson, W.H. "On the Nature of Blake's Symbolism." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 15.3 (Fall 1973). 449-64.