text: The original title of the poem is "Christian Forbearance", and was placed as number 10 in the Rossetti manuscript, printed on a plate illustrated by a corpse under a barren tree. The body was shown in a similar manner to the crucified corpse of Blake's "A Negro on the Rack" in John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative.
  Poem
  The poem relies on a trochaic beat. It consists of four stanzas and begins with an emphasis on the first person.
  The original draft has a line drawn beneath the first stanza, which could denote that Blake originally intended the poem as concluding at the 4th line. There are also many differences between the manuscript and published versions of the poem, with the original line 3 and 4 reading "At a Friends Errors Anger Shew / Mirth at the Errors of a Foe."
  Themes
  The poem suggests that acting on anger reduces the need for vengeance, which may be connected to the British view of anger held following the start of the French Revolution. The revolutionary forces were commonly connected to the anger, with opposing sides arguing that the anger was either a motivating rationale or simply blinded an individual to reason. Blake, like Coleridge, believed that anger needed to be expressed, but both were wary of the type of emotion that, rather than guide, was able to seize control.