Discussion Topic

References to "it" in "A Poison Tree."

Summary:

In "A Poison Tree," "it" refers to the speaker's anger. The poem describes how the speaker nurtures and cultivates this anger, allowing it to grow into a metaphorical tree that ultimately bears poisonous fruit, symbolizing the destructive outcome of unchecked wrath.

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In stanza 5 of "A Poison Tree", what does "it" refer to?

There are only four stanzas in this poem by William Blake, so I think you are actually referring to the word "it" in line five, rather than stanza five. The article "it" here refers back to the "wrath" mentioned in the previous line, which the speaker did not express and which, therefore, grew. However, this poem is an extended metaphor , as the title suggests, in which wrath is imagined taking the physical form of a tree—indeed, a "poison tree," as Blake labels it. The speaker "waters" this wrath, in its tree-like form, and, like a tree, it grows, but the water the speaker provides it with is comprised of his fears, tears, and deceit. The metaphorical tree of wrath thrives on, and is nurtured by, the speaker's bad feelings toward his "foe" and his inability to simply confess his feelings and therefore purge them. Instead, the wrath grows...

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until it bears fruit, which kills the speaker's foe.

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What does 'it' refer to in stanza 3 of "A Poison Tree"?

"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."

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