The Prelude vs A Poison Tree

The Prelude

• Fear: “No familiar shapes remained”, “were a trouble to my dreams”, “There hung a darkness … blank desertion”, “huge and mighty forms, that do not live like living men”

• Nature: “back to the covert of the willow tree”, “the horizon’s utmost boundary”, “heaving through the water like a swan”

• Violence: “I struck and struck again”, “trembling oars”, “strode after me”, “towered up between me and the stars”

A Poison Tree

• Fear: Anaphora Polysydeton → Inevitable loss of control, “the night had veil’d the pole” → North Star, navigation, direction.

• Nature: “A Poison Tree” → allusion to Garden of Eden, sibillance of “sunned”, “smiles”, “soft deceitful wiles”, “grew both day and night”, “bore an apple bright”

• Violence: “my wrath did grow”, “he knew it was mine and into my garden stole”, “my foe outstretched beneath the tree”

Differences

The Prelude is written in blank verse, so sounds more autobiographical & personal, whereas A Poison Tree has an AABB rhyme structure, creating a more fable and child like voice with a moral message.

Contexts

• A Poison Tree (William Blake) & The Prelude (William Wordsworth) are both romantic poets

• The Prelude is about Innocence vs Experience and A Poison Tree came from William Blake’s Songs of Experience.

• Romantic Poets explore the development of the mind, reaction to urbanisation, with nature as a key feature.

• Romantic Poets used powerful emotions recollected in Tranquility