Poison Tree

 At about the middle of the day I checked my email to find a series of messages from a friend. These missives at first expressed anger with me. Then, interpreting my lack of response as a reproach, the messages started arguing back and forth with one another. They vacillated as to whether or not they were truly mad, how mad they were if so, and whether or not I should treat the whole thing as a joke. 

When I saw them, I suffered the quasi-physical reaction that usually occurs in me when I detect conflict—specifically, when I realize someone is angry with me. I can only describe it as a kind of tearing sensation in the gut (I once wrote about it in a poem, available here—the one that starts "When it happened it..."), which then congeals into a kind of throbbing emotional lump in my stomach. 

I sat through the rest of Copyrights class after this happened, trying and failing to keep my mind on the technical rules of duration and renewal. Instead of focusing on the arithmetic as I should, though, I kept thinking over the emails. The words that came to mind for me were from Blake's poem about the "Poison Tree." When I pictured the lump inside me it looked like an apple that had fallen from this tree. 

It's not like this friend and I have never argued before. Indeed, it has been a subject of running commentary between us that I have a predisposition to "wrath"—of precisely the sort that Blake's poem describes. Indeed, as I sit here writing this, I am sipping hot water out of a mug that this friend created specially for me, and which bears across its center the single word—in scary capitals—"WRATH."

But the particular salvo of renewed argument that came in the email took me off-guard. I didn't see it coming. True, we had just argued the weekend before; but I thought we had fully reconciled. I had poured out my own wrath, apologized for what I then conceded as my contribution, and then extracted an apology from him for what I saw as his share. I thought we had settled it, and that all was now forgiven. 

This, after all, is precisely the procedure that Blake's poem seems to recommend. On a straightforward reading, the poem is a simple warning about the perils of emotional repression. The "poison tree" grows from an impulse to express anger that the speaker suppresses. Instead of stifling the emotion thereby, he only causes it to fester. But the anger that the speaker expresses overtly, by contrast, soon dissipates. 

Thus, the poem's advice appears to be little more than to "let it all out"—express the wrath, so that the wrath might "end." This of course comports with Blake's general opposition to repression in all forms (better to throttle "an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires," he wrote). And it's intuitive to us, in our Romantic culture. It's the same idea behind the pop psychology of the Bachelor advice to "open up."

But life—and the poem—are more complicated than that. For I did express my wrath, and I felt unburdened to be sure, just as Blake predicted. My "wrath did end," after I uttered it aloud to my friend. But, it turns out, his wrath was just beginning. In the very act of uttering and thereby uprooting my own poison tree, I was planting the seed of another poison tree within him. 

How so? Because he started to suppress his own feelings. With my wrath, I had bullied him into offering an apology that I was perhaps not owed—or that he was not at any rate prepared yet to give. I therefore left feeling relieved, but he was now bottling things up. He had developed wrath about my wrath. He resented the apology I had extorted. He did not like that I had seized a moral upper hand, perhaps unduly. 

Blake's poem contemplates this too—and perhaps this is why the poem is included among his "Songs of Experience," rather than those of "Innocence." For even as the poem tells a hopeful story about the benefits of unburdening oneself of one's feelings, it also describes what happens to the person who apologizes for the sake of peace, bottling up their own emotions all the while. 

What I had misinterpreted as a full reconciliation, during our conversation last weekend, was really just a one-sided suppression. I had unburdened myself fully. But he was holding back his own feelings for the sake of compromise. What felt to me like mutual give-and-take may have in reality resembled something closer to Blake's process of "sunning" the poison tree "with smiles" and "soft deceitful wiles."

Is there any way out of the cycle, then? Does one person "opening up" and uncorking their feelings just force the other person to suppress their own, until that suppression breeds its own poisoned fruit? Perhaps we just need to accept it. Say: better to simply remain mad for a time than to force a premature reconciliation. Better to throttle an apology, we might put it, than to nurse unexpressed wrath.