A Poison Tree

I've done five pages of writing tonight on William Blake's "A Poison Tree" from Songs of Experience. Almost all of those five pages have focused on meter. Never again will I forget what a trochee is.

I find it scary just how much a great writer can fit into a handful of lines. The images and metrical devices in "A Poison Tree" are not too terribly packed in. Yet, I've had no problem throwing down five solid pages about one aspect of the poem's 16 lines. Nothing is so deceptively simple as a well-written poem. I shudder to think how much one could pull out of sixteen lines of Milton, an author who really condensed a lot into each line. I'm sure whole books have been written about four quatrains of Milton. The more and more I read, the more I realize why Milton is considered the best ever. I was skeptical at first, but now I don't doubt it. I think it is so funny to read through everything that happened for the two or three centuries to follow John Milton, and find where all the great writers cherry-picked ideas from him. Except for A.E. Houseman. He wrote some great poems, but Houseman was a strange bird if there ever was one. Sad one too.