"A Poison Tree" is a poem by William Blake about the dangers of resentment, with wrath imagined as a seed which then, because of the way it is treated by the speaker, grows into a tree. In the second stanza, then, we can assume that "it" refers to this wrath; if we look back at the first stanza, this is a logical continuation of "it" in the final line, which represents a wrath which grew because the speaker did not express it.
The second stanza describes the process of this seed of wrath growing as the speaker "waterd" it with "fears," "tears," and "smiles"—that is, encouraging the wrath to grow with everything he does. By the time we see the tree in the third stanza, it has grown "till it bore an apple bright," the wrath here having been fed to the point that it is able to produce something visible to indicate to the "foe" that it exists. Blake is suggesting here that wrath untold will always be revealed eventually simply because nurturing it in silence only makes it stronger, so it would be simpler just to tell the wrath in the first place to make it quickly "end."
Saturday, February 9, 2019
What do you think 'it' refers to in stanza 3?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Why is the fact that the Americans are helping the Russians important?
In the late author Tom Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt for Red October, the assistance rendered to the Russians by the United States is impor...
-
There are a plethora of rules that Jonas and the other citizens must follow. Again, page numbers will vary given the edition of the book tha...
-
The poem contrasts the nighttime, imaginative world of a child with his daytime, prosaic world. In the first stanza, the child, on going to ...
-
The given two points of the exponential function are (2,24) and (3,144). To determine the exponential function y=ab^x plug-in the given x an...
-
The only example of simile in "The Lottery"—and a particularly weak one at that—is when Mrs. Hutchinson taps Mrs. Delacroix on the...
-
Hello! This expression is already a sum of two numbers, sin(32) and sin(54). Probably you want or express it as a product, or as an expressi...
-
Macbeth is reflecting on the Weird Sisters' prophecy and its astonishing accuracy. The witches were totally correct in predicting that M...
-
The play Duchess of Malfi is named after the character and real life historical tragic figure of Duchess of Malfi who was the regent of the ...
No comments:
Post a Comment