The poem "A Poison Tree" by William Blake was written in 1794. It tells the story of a boy who gets really angry with his enemy, so he gets revenge. So a seed grows in him which turns into an apple. The enemy eats this poisonous apple and dies.
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In stanza one, the poet describes the anger against his friend, which he then tells him of. Then he gets angry again with his enemy, he doesn't tell his enemy about this anger. So then his anger grows.
The word "wrath" suggests extreme anger, a lot of anger.
The poet uses repetition of words like "wrath" and "anger" to emphasise the difference between friends and enemies. .
Stanza two introduces the image of his anger growing in him like a poisonous tree. The words "I watered it in fears" and "I sunned it with smiles" mean that behind all his happiness towards revenge, he is scared and frightened that his enemy might do something to him, or maybe he is scared that his plan might not work as planned. He smiled with false smiles, as he didn't want to be sad, and get any of this in the way.
The effect of the alliteration in "sunned", "smiles", and "soft" is to give out that effect of sssss, which sounds quite scary and sly.
"Deceitful wiles" shows that Blake tries to cause someone to believe something false, and he's got cunning plans, to convince his enemy that the apple was bright, nice, tasty shinny, so his enemy would want to eat it.
The next stanza describes how the poison tree grows an apple. It is very tempting as shown by words like "bright" and "shine". It makes the poets enemy feel tempted to eat the apple and jealous that the apple was not his. In stanza four it says "And into my garden stole," which I think means that he crept into the garden. If someone creeps in the garden that would mean they want something, so the enemy probably wanted the apple because he was very tempted by the plan, and also jealous as he didn't have a nice apple like that.
