William Blake's poem A Poison Tree embodies some of the primary concepts of the Romantic Period. Blake explores elements of emotion, anger, and demonstrates his respect for the power of thought. He tells a story of anger, communication, and wrath, through which; he reveals the benefits of communication and the dangers of repressing emotion and desire. Blake intertwines this story with images of temptation and a strong biblical allusion.
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 primary theme of the first stanza is that by expressing his emotion the speaker overcame his feelings, however repressing that emotion caused it to grow more intense. .
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".
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".