Compare And Contrast A Poison Tree And The Cask Of Amontillado

The poem “A Poison Tree” and the story “The Cask of Amontillado” are similar in that the main characters portray a sense of fake friendliness, and instead they secretly plot their harmful intentions in their heads; both main characters get revenge on their enemies; and ultimately the end result of their actions correspond to each other. These pieces of literature do a great job at showing the effects of allowing one’s anger to grow.

One similarity that these two pieces share are how the main characters do not give insight to the fact that they are mad, but both know that they are secretly plotting how to get revenge. For example, in the text of “The Cask of Amontillado” it says, “I continued, as my wont, to smile in his face, and he did not perceive that my smile now was …show more content…
Also he explains that he is also plotting to act on his revenge by using the phrase “deceitful wiles” where wiles means ideas, and deceitful means that he is misleading his enemy to the right perception of him. Both pieces show how insusceptible our main characters are to the truth. They believe that revenge is the best way of acting upon their feelings and that hiding their emotions is a wise choice.

Another parallel between these two texts are that both narrators act upon their intentions of revenge. In “A Poison Tree” the narrator uses a metaphor to explain how his anger is like a growing tree, and then he later implies how the apple sprouted from the tree is the revenge he has been plotting. In the poem it says, “And it grew both day and night. Til it bore an apple bright. And my foe beheld its shine, And he knew that it was mine.” Once revenge had been acted upon, his enemy had realized the anger came from the narrator. Similarly, in “The Cask of Amontillado” the narrator, Montresor gets his revenge by trapping him down in his family’s vault