William Blake Research Paper
McKenna Smalley
Ms. Adams
ENG3U1
26 May 2016
Fatal Relationships William Blake commonly wrote about death in his poetry. In “Love’s Secret” and “A Poison Tree” is no different. “Love’s Secret” presents a story of a speaker who lets his lover know about his feelings and emotions toward her, which in turn the lover passes away. While “A Poison Tree” represents the result of building anger on a relationship over time. Blake views the great enemy of the self--its Satan--is system, forever luring us into the two most terrible of human errors: self-contradiction and self-limitation. Blake shows these human errors in his poems and we learn that the poems are connected with the theme of death. Blake uses metaphors and imagery to develop his theme
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In “A Poison Tree” the speaker talks about cultivating anger as if it were a plant. Naturally he must water the plant in order for it to grow. He doesn’t water the plant with ordinary water, but instead with his negative tears, “I watered it in fears/ Night and morning with my tears”. Sadness, anger, and other negative feelings become the life-giving liquid that causes the tree to grow poisonous. The tree being watered with anger causes it to develop into a poison tree as a result. This imagery Blake uses shows how the speaker’s negative emotion helps contribute to the growth of the tree. In “Love’s Secret” Blake uses imagery to represent the death his lover. In the second stanza opens with the speaker telling his lover how he loves her with all his heart, then suddenly the stanza becomes negative by the lover dying, “trembling cold, in ghastly fears”. Often when people die they are not only cold, but they also fear death like the lover. “Trembling cold” shows how the lover was cold, as if she’s dying and “ghastly fears” represents the fear from the lover towards dying. This imagery indicates that after he expressed to his lover that he loved her, she died unexpectedly. In “A Poison Tree” and “Love’s Secret” Blake uses imagery to help develop the theme of
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