Figurative Language In A Poison Tree

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Fruits of Wrath

William Blake’s A Poison Tree exhibits creative sentence structures and metaphors of growth to create a twisting or curling movement through the text; this illustrates wrath growing like a vine, sprawling without direction, uncontrollable. Blake’s melodic style, use of figurative language, and inversion delivers layers of syntax, bold imagery, and a musical tune that accentuates the spiraling growth of wrath.

The poem is composed in trochaic tetrameter--with a few iambic exceptions--delivering a bouncy melody with rebounding beats; this should give the reader a sense of conflicting ideas. The first stanza is arranged by simple sentences, easily navigated and straightforward. This stanza lacks the imagery and literary devices exhibited in the following stanzas. The speaker tells his
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Here, the speaker alludes to the pole, possibly the North Star or Northern and Southern poles, indication direction; but tells the reader that this pole is veiled by darkness of night time. This imagery portrays concealment, like withheld wrath in the first stanza, leaving the speaker’s direction, or sense of right and wrong, veiled. The author’s use of “veiled” as a verb makes the concealment seem temporary and possibly intentional. Is the speaker addressing a conscious acknowledgement in the first and last stanzas, possibly exposing inent by revealing that his own direction has been veiled by a darkness, possibly causing him to fuel his wrath? Did the speaker conceal his wrath from his foe knowing it would fester and act against his enemy? Maybe the speaker only means to expose that, in the end, before any damning evidence arises, concealing wrath sustains it and leads to dire consequences. Either way, Blake clearly intended for the reader to identify layers of syntax here, in the final stanza, like many of his other poems. But these lines do call to question whether the speaker is aware of what he

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