By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
What are the most important themes William Blake’s poem ‘A Poison Tree’? The poem is from Blake’s 1794 volume Songs of Experience, the companion-volume to his earlier Songs of Innocence. ‘A Poison Tree’ is a powerful poem about anger, and how anger eats away at us, causing us to behave in deceitful and dishonest ways, but anger isn’t the only theme Blake explores in this fascinating but ambiguous poem.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘A Poison Tree’ is one of the poems from William Blake’s 1794 volume Songs of Experience, the companion-volume to his earlier Songs of Innocence. This poem – one of his most popular and widely studied – is about the ways in which anger eats away at us when it is ignored and not addressed, with Blake using the ‘poison tree’ as a metaphor for this abstract phenomenon.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Tyger’ is not only one of the best-known poems of the poet and engraver William Blake (1757-1827): it is only of the best-known and best-loved poems in the English language. Part of the power of Blake’s paean to the terrible beauty of the tiger is the insistent trochaic rhythm of the lines, with their forceful opening syllables, but the poem is also full of memorable quotations.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The poet and artist William Blake (1757-1827) has given us a number of phrases which have passed into common use: ‘green and pleasant land’ and ‘chariot of fire’ are just two of many examples. But what are the best Blake quotations, and what do they mean? In which of his works do they appear?
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Unlike many of his other celebrated poems, William Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’ languished unpublished in notebooks for decades after his death, and was only first published in 1863. In a sense, ‘Auguries of Innocence’ provides a backdrop for the poet’s most famous poetry, and is worth subjecting to close analysis. Here’s the poem first: