text: The image of the tree appears in many of Blake's poems, and seems connected to his concept of the Fall of Man. It is possible to read the narrator as a divine figure who uses the tree to seduce mankind into disgrace. This use of the fallen state can also be found in the poems "The Human Abstract" and "London" from the Songs of Experience series. The actual tree, described as a tree of "Mystery", appears again in "The Human Abstract", and both trees are grown within the mind.
  Reception
  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, after being lent a copy of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience by Charles Tulk, annotated the lines of his copy with symbols representing the phrases "it gave me great pleasure" "and yet" "in the lowest".
  An anonymous review in the March 1830 London University Magazine titled "The Inventions of William Blake, Paint and Poet", stated before discussing the poem: "let us continue to look over his notes, bright both with poetry and forms divine, which demonstrate an intimate knowledge of the passions and feelings of the human breast". After quoting the poem in full, the writer claimed, "If Blake had lived in Germany, by this time he would have had commentators of the highest order upon every one of his effusions; but here, so little attention is paid to works of the mind".
  Ralph Vaughan Williams set the poem to music in his 1958 song cycle Ten Blake Songs. The poem was set to music in 1965 by Benjamin Britten as part of his song cycle Songs and Proverbs of William Blake.
  Andrew Stauffer, in 2009, claimed that the poem is "Blake's best-known depiction of personal anger's destructive effects".