Internal conflict is a psychological struggle in the mind of a literary character who has been influenced by external forces and ambitions. Macbeth, written in 1606, one of Shakespeare's many tragedies, and The Poison Tree, written in 1793 by William Blake, are two different narratives from two different literary presentations. However, these two stories share the theme of internal conflict and guilt which is explored equally throughout the lyrics. These two texts will be compared and contrasted, outlining the context, conventions and linguistic characteristics used to give life to their textual productions. Shakespeare uses his five-act structure and the conventions of a dramatic text to portray and represent the tragedy of the play in the contextual time period. While Blake uses symbolism and literary devices to give meaning to his poem A Poison Tree. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay William Blake, born in 1757 in London, had a passion for creating poems and presenting them in an artistic way. He published his first illustrated series of poems in the year 1789 called Songs of Innocence, followed by a second illustrated series of poems Songs of Experience in 1793 from which The Poison Tree is derived. When creating lyrics, Blake focused on understanding and writing about the hidden emotions of humans that take advantage of the two states of the human soul. On the other hand, William Shakespeare was born in 1564, about 400 years before William Blake lived in the era when King James VI ruled England. Shakespeare's play Macbeth was written as a text to show gratitude to King James VI who was recently crowned. However, Macbeth can also be seen as a cautionary tale in response to the Gunpowder Plot, a failed assassination of King James VI. Whereas Blake's series of poems may have been a response to the French Republic's declaration of war on England. This may also have vaguely influenced William Blake to publish A Poison Tree to describe the ultimate loss of France by metaphorically describing the country as the enemy in the poem. Both texts share similar structural conventions, where both Macbeth and A Poison Tree follow the journey. /events that lead to the protagonist's final development into the antagonist. The difference between the two texts, however, is the presence of external pressures that influence the protagonist. Shakespeare's tragedy tells of the ambitious Macbeth who aspires to become king of Scotland by betraying King Duncan. It does this by giving in to the external pressures that caused an internal conflict, bringing it to an end. In A Poison Tree, the narrator was not inclined to external factors but only to internal emotions that allowed him to consume his enemy with hatred. The phrase “My anger has grown” shows the narrator's internal conflict to resolve the differences between this enemy. To support this, the narrator “watered him with fears, the night and the morning with tears: and he sunned him with smiles”. There is no evidence in the poem to suggest that there were external pressures that influenced the narrator to kill his enemy. In Macbeth, however, many characters and symbols pressured Macbeth to kill King Duncan, which drove the plot of the story. One of these was Lady Macbeth, who embodied the desire to kill the king. Due to her role as a woman, she was not suspected of the king's murder as women would have been seen as weak in Shakespeare's time. Both Blake and Shakespeare use language and stylistic features to express and explore the idea of ​​internal conflict.