A Comparison Between Crow Lake and a Poison Tree

Sadness, anger, sorrow and fear, William Blake’s poem is a great description of what might happen, if we let our emotions grow stronger and get the best of us, instead of trying to stop them. The things we do when we let them control our lives are not exactly the best ones, and it can be reflected in Mary Lawson’s novel “Crow Lake” this novel is about the disappointments between siblings that can result in lifelong misunderstandings, it is also about how mistakes made in the past can affect the present of a family, and become the curse of one. Bringing back our main topics, sorrow, sadness, anger, and fear, we can tell that every single emotion needs a complement for it to grow, in this case, sadness and sorrow help anger to grow. If you are sad about something is because something bad might have happened to you, so it also needs a tragedy and the novel “Crow Lake” is full of them. We can see the first tragedy of the Morrison’s being when the parents of Kate, Luke, Matt, and Bo died in a car crash, we can sense the emotion reflected in Kate’s thoughts, “I’ve gone over that mealtime many times in my mind, less because of Luke’s astounding news than because it turned out to be our last family supper” (Lawson 9). Kate’s repetitive thoughts about her parents’ car crash, about how people reacted to that incident, were like the watering to her emotions, as in “A poison tree”, “And I watered it in tears, night and morning with my tears; And I sunned it with smiles, and with soft deceitful wiles” (Blake 8).

The novel needs of tragedy so the anger that grows between Matt and Luke can develop, an example of this could be a fight they had, 'There was a curious sound a kind of dull snap, [Kate states] and terrific yell from Matt, and then he crashed into the wall and slid down it to the floor” (Lawson 181), as in “A poison tree” the foe ends up under a tree, destroyed by the speaker’s pent up anger, “...In the morning glad I see, my foe outstretched beneath a tree.” (Blake 16). The Pye family, despite not being the protagonist, has an interesting story within the novel. The family curse over three generations of domestic abuse, taking members of the family to a point where one, would choose to risk his life over seeing his own father, Kate states, “What haunted me the most of all was the thought that three generations back, there was a Pye son who was prepared to risk freezing to death rather than face his father” (Lawson 42). William Blake’s poem suggests that anger is like an apple that grows accompanied with fear and sadness, “And it grew both day and night, till it bore an apple bright...” (Blake 12). Suppressed feelings can lead you to a bad ending; Just like it led the Pye son to escape from his father, with his skin blue, his teeth chattering, and trying to figure out to keep from freezing, only because he was afraid of what his father, might have done to him, if he found out. Overall, the poem and the novel focus on the emotion of anger and the consequences for our relationships should that anger be suppressed. It deals with the darker side of the human psyche. Any emotion that comes to consciousness without being released, is stored in the subconscious. Repress our emotions by wanting to escape them and never doing it, could be the ending to our emotional stability or even, to our own lives.