A Poison Tree
William Blake
I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I waterd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night.
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.
And into my garden stole,
When the night had veild the pole;
In the morning glad I see;
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
독나무
나는 친구에게 화가 났었네.
화가 났다고 말했더니, 화가 풀렸네.
나는 원수에게 화가 났었네.
그렇다고 말하지 않았더니, 나의 화가 자라났네.
나는 그것에 물을 주었네 두려움 속에서,
밤이나 아침이나 나의 눈물로;
나는 그것에 햇살을 쏘여주었네 나의 미소와,
부드러운 거짓꾀로.
그랬더니 그것은 밤이나 낮이나 자라나,
마침내 빛나는 사과 한 알 달렸네.
나의 원수는 그것이 빛나는 걸 보았네.
그는 그것이 나의 것임을 알고서.
나의 뜰로 숨어 들어왔네.
밤이 하늘을 가리웠을 때;
아침에 나는 기쁘게도 보네.
나의 원수가 나무 밑에 뻗어 있음을.
"A Poison Tree" is a poem by English poet William Blake, first published in his Songs of Experience in 1794. In deceptively simple language with an almost nursery-rhyme quality, the speaker of the poem details two different approaches to anger. In the first, openly talking about anger is presented as a way of moving past it. In the second, the speaker outlines the danger of keeping anger within. The poem uses an extended metaphor to describe the speaker's anger as growing into a tree that bears poisonous apples. The speaker's enemy then eats an apple from the tree and dies. The poem is generally interpreted as an allegory for the danger of bottling up emotions, and how doing so leads to a cycle of negativity and even violence.
“A Poison Tree” Summary
The speaker recounts being mad at a friend. The speaker told their friend about this anger, which subsequently went away. By contrast, when the speaker was angry with an enemy, the speaker kept quiet. Their anger then increased.
The speaker cultivated this anger as if it were something planted in a garden, metaphorically nourishing it with fears and tears, both day and night. The speaker's smiles and other gentle deceptions used to hide the anger, in fact only fed the anger further.
The anger grew constantly until it became a tree, which bore a bright apple. The speaker's enemy saw this apple shining and knew it belonged to the speaker.
The enemy snuck into the speaker's garden during the dead of night. The next morning, the speaker is happy to see this enemy lying dead beneath the tree.
“A Poison Tree” Themes
Anger and Suppressed Emotion
In "A Poison Tree" the speaker presents a powerful argument against the suppression of anger. By clearly laying out the benefits of talking about anger, and the consequences of keeping negative emotions within, the poem implies to the reader that the suppression of anger is morally dangerous, leading only to more anger or even violence.
The speaker presents two distinct scenarios to illustrate the danger of suppressing anger. In the first two lines of the poem, the speaker describes admitting his or her "wrath" to a friend; as soon as the speaker does so, this “wrath” ends. Honesty and frankness, the speaker makes clear, causes anger to disappear.
By contrast, as described in lines 2 through lines 16 of the poem, the poem details the negative consequences of suppressed anger. In these lines, the speaker does not open up about being angry. Instead, the speaker actively tends to his or her wrath as if it were a garden, watering it with “fears” and “tears,” and “sunning” it with "smiles" and cunning deceit in a way that indicates a kind of morbid pleasure. The speaker’s careful cultivation of this rage-garden implies an inability to move on from whatever made the speaker angry in the first place, as well as the self-perpetuating nature of negative emotions; anger encourages fear, despair, and deceit—which, in turn, simply nourish more anger. The suppression of emotion thus begins a cycle of festering negativity that eventually takes on a life of its own. Through the growth of the tree and its poisonous apple, the repression of anger is shown to cause a chain reaction that makes the problem far worse than it would have been had the speaker and the "foe" just talked through their issues.
This poisonous growth contrasts with the simple way in which the anger was eliminated in the first scenario—when it was "told." Through this contrast, the poem makes clear a moral choice: either talk and find solutions, or keep quiet and enable the far-reaching, poisonous effects that come when people hold their angry emotions too close to the chest. Implicit in the poem, then, is the idea that the root of human conflict grows from the inability to find common ground through meaningful communication. The fact that, at the end of the poem, the speaker is "glad" to find the enemy lying dead beneath the tree shows the way in which, in the second scenario, the anger increasingly dominates the way the speaker sees other human beings—the speaker becomes a host for the growth of anger, which feeds on others' pain. The poem, then, suggests and warns against the fact that anger is an all-consuming emotion when allowed to grow unchecked.
The simplicity of the lines and the use of extended metaphor—the growth of the tree reflects the growth of the anger—also makes the message of the poem applicable well beyond the immediate conflict between the speaker and the foe. In fact, these two figures can be read as allegorical representations of different parts of humanity itself, showing the way that war and hatred develop from misplaced anger. This more general reading of the poem's moral message is further amplified by the clear allusion between the poison tree of the poem to the tree in the garden of Eden. The poem can therefore be read as an argument against the psychological suppression of anger on both the personal and even the societal level.
"A Poison Tree" ultimately makes a powerful argument in favor of opening up and trusting in the human capacity for empathy and understanding. The alternative, the poem argues, is far more dangerous.
윌리엄 블레이크, 독나무
1794년 발표된 시집 "경험의 시" (Songs of Experience)에 포함된 이 시는 윌리엄 블레이크의 대표작 중의 하나로 잘 알려진 시이다. 분노, 복수, 더 나아가 인간의 타락을 시사하고 있다.
분노가 표출되지 않고 억눌러져 있으면 더 큰 비극으로 나타난다는 것을 보여주고 있다. 억압된 프랑스 민중의 분노가 1789년 프랑스 혁명으로 이끈 당시 시대 상황과도 연관될 수 있다.
사과, 나무, 유혹, 죽음 등은 인간의 타락을 묘사하는 기독교적 이미지와 유사하다. 이 시의 원제목은 "기독교적 자제" (Christian forbearance)이다.