Yiorgos Christakis AP English Literature Mrs.

Kelly A Poison Tree Poetry Paper The poem A Poison Tree tells the story of bottled up wrath, left to fester and grow, and the consequences of that wrath. There have been points in my life where this same scenario has occurred, but to a much lesser degree. The apotheosis of these several incidents came one day while I was with two friends. Just as in the poem, my anger escalated, and instead of ever talking it through, I let it get to a boiling point. The difference between my own experience, and that of the poem, is that mine occurred among friends, and it also did not result in death. The storyline of the poem is very dark. It uses the growth of an apple, from seed, to tree, to the individual fruit, to symbolize the spawning of anger, its development, and eventually its climax. The enemy of the angered person eventually consumes this poison apple of wrath, and falls dead underneath the tree. The apple is a metaphor for the vehicle that carries out the will of the man with welled up anger. It represents the rusty dagger, the poisoned tea, and all other weapons often wielded under the veil of unchecked ire. My story is not quite so violent, or so dark as the poem. While with two friends I gave an intelligent answer to some random meaningless question, thenceforth I bore the name Dr. Phil. I could not say anything, give an opinion, argue my side, or really contribute to conversation in any form because every single time I spoke I was interrupted with an exclamation of Shut up Dr. Phil or Yeah, okay Dr. Phil. I took this miserable abuse for some time, bottling up my silent rage, until at one point I just snapped, sat down, and refused to move speak or react to anything going on around me. I sat stunned in a frozen fit of anger that I had allowed to build up for quite awhile, but in the end a resolution was reached and everything improved. The similarities between the two stories are fairly obvious. Both stories involve some bottled up form of frustration and wrath that lead to a climactic turn of events. Also both stories have some antagonistic entity or enemy that is the cause of the negative feelings. The differences are evident especially in the results of the stories, but also in the scenario. In my story my anger is built up against my friends, while the anger of the narrator in the poem is built against his enemy. Another difference is that I did not end up killing either of my friends, but the narrator ended up killing his enemy. The conse-

quences of my bottled up anger were much less severe than those of the poem, and were in fact, resolved fairly shortly after the incident. Everyone experiences negative feelings from some source at some point in their lives, and they will, eventually, bottle some of those feelings up and leave them to fester. Both the poem, and my own story have a moral that should be paid close attention to, even if the tales do vary. That moral is that withholding negative feelings can be detrimental not only to the individual, but also anyone related to or around them. I am glad that it did not take me killing someone to learn this lesson, as it must have for someone in this world.