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The Tyger is arguably the most famous poem written by William Blake (1757-1827); its difficult to say which is more well-known, The Tyger or the poem commonly known as Jerusalem. The poems opening line, Tyger Tyger, burning bright is among the most famous opening lines in English poetry (its sometimes modernised as Tiger, Tiger, burning bright). Below is this iconic poem, followed by a brief but close analysis of the poems language, imagery, and meaning.
The Tyger was first published in William Blakes 1794 volume Songs of Experience, which contains many of his most celebrated poems. The Songs of Experience was designed to complement Blakes earlier collection, Songs of Innocence (1789), and The Tyger should be seen as the later volumes answer to The Lamb, the innocent poem that had appeared in the earlier volume.
Framed as a series of questions, Tyger Tyger, burning bright (as the poem is also often known), in summary, sees Blakes speaker wondering about the creator responsible for such a fearsome creature as the tiger. The fiery imagery used throughout the poem conjures the tigers aura of danger: fire equates to fear. Dont get too close to the tiger, Blakes poem seems to say, otherwise youll get burnt.
The first stanza and sixth stanza, alike in every respect except for the shift from Could frame to Dare frame, frame the poem, asking about the immortal creator responsible for the beast.
The second stanza continues the fire imagery established by the image of the tiger burning bright, with talk of the fire of the creatures eyes, and the notion of the creator fashioning the tiger out of pure fire, as if he (or He) had reached his hand into the fire and moulded the creature from it. (The image succeeds, of course, because of the flame-like appearance of a tigers stripes.) It must have been a god who played with fire who made the tiger.
In the third and fourth stanzas, Blake introduces another central metaphor, explicitly drawing a comparison between God and a blacksmith. It is as if the Creator made the blacksmith in his forge, hammering the base materials into the living and breathing ferocious creature which now walks the earth.
he fifth stanza is more puzzling, but stars have long been associated with human destiny (as the root of astrology highlights). For Kathleen Raine, this stanza can be linked with another of William Blakes works, The Four Zoas, where the phrase which we also find in The Tyger, the stars threw down their spears, also appears.
There it is the godlike creator of the universe (Urizen in Blakes mythology) who utters it; Urizens fall, and the fall of the stars and planets, are what brought about the creation of life on Earth in Blakes Creation story. When the Creator fashioned the Tyger, Blake asks, did he look with pride upon the animal he had created?
How might we analyse The Tyger? What does it mean? The broader point is one that many Christian believers have had to grapple with: if God is all-loving, why did he make such a fearsome and dangerous animal? We cant easily fit the tiger into the All Things Bright and Beautiful view of Christian creation. As Blake himself asks, Did he who made the Lamb make thee? In other words, did God make the gentle and meek animals, but also the destructive and ferocious ones?
Presumably the question is rhetorical; the real question-behind-the-question is why. (This might help to explain Blakes reference to fearful symmetry: he is describing not only the remarkable patterns on the tigers skin and fur which humans have learned to go in fear of, but the symmetry between the innocent lamb on the one hand and the fearsome tiger on the other. (Fearful means fearsome here, confusingly.)
Indeed, we might take such an analysis further and see the duality between the lamb and the tiger as being specifically about the two versions of God in Christianity: the vengeful and punitive Old Testament God, Yahweh, and the meek and forgiving God presented in the New Testament.
What bolsters such an interpretation is the long-established associations between the lamb and Jesus Christ. The tiger, whilst not a biblical animal, embodies the violent retribution and awesome might of Yahweh in the Old Testament. Or, as the Blake scholar D. G. Gillham, in his informative and fascinating study of Blakes poetry, Blakes Contrary States: The Songs of Innocence and Experience as Dramatic Poems, puts it: A universe that contains beasts of prey must be a ruthless one, and his questions are so framed that any possible answer must first explain that.
Certainly, when we contrast The Lamb with The Tyger, we realise that although the speakers of both poems ask questions, the crucial difference is that the questions are left unanswered in the latter poem. Not so in The Lamb: D. G. Gillham observes that whereas the child-speaker of The Lamb is confident in, and proud of, his knowledge of the lamb (Little Lamb, Ill tell thee &), the speaker of The Tyger is marked by uncertainty. Question after question comes at us, and an answer to any of them seems impossible: the speaker can do no more than wonder, as Gillham notes. This is because the Creator who made the tiger is not meant to be understood by us: he works in mysterious ways.
But is the Christian belief-system the only way of approaching Blakes Tyger? Returning to the significance of fire in the poem, its worth noting that this fiery imagery also summons the idea of Greek myth specifically, the myth of Prometheus, the deity who stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind.
From that daring act of transgression, mans development followed. Once man had fire, he was free, and had the divine spark (literally, in being able to create fire). Blakes question What the hand, dare seize the fire? alludes to the figure of Prometheus, seizing fire from the gods and giving it to man. The Tyger seems to embody, in part, this transgressive yet divine spirit.
But none of these readings quite settles down into incontrovertible fact. The Tyger remains, like the creature itself, an enigma, a fearsome and elusive beast.
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