Poetry Essay: The Tree Of Forbidden Knowledge

Eventually the tree matures completely, culminating in “an apple bright,” which the foe sees and desires for himself, just as Adam did in God’s garden. Similar to the fruit from the Tree of Forbidden Knowledge, this fruit stands at once as a harbinger of danger and a tantalizing temptation for the speaker’s unsuspecting foe. The speaker now becomes the Serpent that tempted Eve, capitalizing on the sin of Envy, allowing his foe to “behold its shine” (11). The speaker can read his foe’s mind: “And my foe beheld it shine, / and he knew that it was mine” (11-12), implying the ease with which he can fool his enemy by exploiting his foe’s natural curiosity and covetousness. Ending this stanza with a comma in place of a period accelerates the fatal line of action into the fourth and final

The final image conveyed is the foe lying “outstretched beneath the tree” (16), breaking the poem’s gradual movement by jumping to the following morning. With dawn comes simultaneously the poem’s climax and resolution: the speaker is “glad [to] see / My foe outstretched beneath the tree” (15-16). The speaker seems satisfied that his deceitful plan worked, ridding himself of his source of wrath by poisoning it with his festered anger. Omitting the murder scene from the poem only emphasizes the murderous means by which the speaker has taken to avenge himself. Here, Blake reflects the speaker’s state of mind: as he wants to kill his enemy, he also desires to kill his own conscience, blurring away the act of murder as he blurs away the source of his anger. The speaker realizes the destruction he has caused, the immoral ground he now stands upon, but is so enclosed within his own wrath that he cannot stop himself from seeing his scheme through. With a Macbethian ending, the mortal sin of murder will forever stain the speaker's hands - and he cannot live with himself unless he suppresses the event, as he did his