William Blake's 'The Tyger'

• William Blake was an English poet and artist, born in 1757 and died in 1827.
• He was born into a working-class family in London and stopped attending school at the age of ten.
• Blake was a key figure in the Romantic Movement, which aimed to address the dehumanizing effects of the Industrial Revolution by returning to nature and the past.
• Blake was a radical thinker who supported the French and American Revolutions' goals of equality for all.
• He was a committed Christian, and his non-conformist beliefs are apparent in much of his work.
• In 1794, Blake's most well-known poems were released in a collection called 'Songs of Innocence and Experience'.
• The 'Songs' collection is divided into two parts: Innocence and Experience.
• The poems contrast a childlike view of the world with poems that reflect the loss of that innocent perspective.
• "The Tyger" appears in the Experience section of 'Songs of Experience'
• The poem is presented from the perspective of an experienced speaker who has lost the innocent worldview.
• Tigers were rare in 1790s London, giving them a mythic status as powerful creatures.
• The poem is addressed to a tiger.
• The speaker questions the tiger's creator who is capable of creating something beautiful and deadly.
• The poem explores this question but lacks a definitive solution.
• The writer communicates the poet's amazement at how God is accountable for both good and evil in humanity through the poem.

Analysis

• The poem focuses on the tiger, but is written to a tiger directly.
• The first verse addresses the animal in a single long sentence.
• The poem has a distinct rhythmic and rhyme structure.
• Each line consists of seven syllables.
• The seven syllables are divided into trochees, which consist of one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable.
• A strong rhythm is created by this pattern, comparable to the striking of a hammer or the padding of silent paws.
• Each line concludes with an unstressed syllable, creating a sense of incompleteness.
• The poem's failure to answer the speaker's query reflects this, emphasizing the difficulty of understanding God.
• The rhyme scheme is AABB to give the impression of a tiger's pounding feet.
• The poem starts with a call to the beast, "Tyger, Tyger".
• The opening uses alliteration on the 't' and 'b' sounds for a staccato and stealthy effect.
• The metaphor "burning bright" describes the tiger alight or in fire.
• The description vividly shows the tiger's mottled orange color while highlighting its dangerous and beautiful aspects.
• Like fire, the tiger is deadly but also magical.
• The stanza ends with the question, "What immortal hand or eye,/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"
• The question drives the poem by questioning what creator would create the tiger's symmetry.
• The tiger represents more than just an apex predator.
• It also represents the concept of destruction in the world.
• The question is about why a good and kind God would create a world with both kindness and cruelty.
• The first and last stanzas ask the same question on what sort of god would create destruction in the world.
• The last stanza uses "Dare frame" instead of "could frame".
• "Dare" refers to having enough bravery to create it.
• The speaker's thinking has evolved from wondering who would create evil to wondering who would be reckless enough to do it.
• The speaker's anxiety remains unresolved, and they are horrified by the idea that God deliberately created evil to feed on humanity.
• The second stanza considers where the tiger may have been created.
• Except for one line, the poem consists entirely of questions showing that the speaker can't comprehend why God would create evil.
• The repeated question pattern shows the speaker's inability to get beyond the idea of God creating evil, with the question cycling through the poem without ever finding a solution.
• The speaker describes the "distant deeps or skies" where the creator would have found "fire" for the tiger's "eyes."
• The description emphasizes the beast's extremity, implying that a creator would have had to search the universe for the components to create the animal.
• "On what wings dare he aspire?" is used as a metaphor as God had the loftiest of ambitions to make a tiger.
• The final line of the stanza envisions God's hand seizing the fire to create the animal to show how brave and stupid you have to be to hold fire in your hands.
• The tiger is shown to be made of flame-like materials, which are usually associated with hell.
• The thought the God is not as meek and mild as Christians think is starting to come through.
• Stanza three continues this idea and starts with the word "And" showing a rushed connection of two parts.
• The narrator is in a rush of ideas, desperately wanting to express his fear and awe to wonder what it took to make the tiger.
• The creator is imagined to have powerful shoulders used to bend and shape the muscles of the tiger's heart implying a more intimidating, powerful form of God.
• The 'dread' or terrifying 'hand' could belong to God's, while the 'dread feet' could belong to either the tiger or its creator.
• The unusual perspective of God is continued in the next stanza.
• God is described as a blacksmith in an extended metaphor working at a furnace that might be a description of the factories of the Industrial Revolution.
• The poem considers what "hammer," "chain," and "furnace" were required to create the tiger's "brain," which serves to emphasize the beast's immense strength, endurance, and power.
• The anvil is a metaphor for a heavy iron block, where the tiger's brain would have been hammered out to show an intimidating beast and a frightening God.
• God is a strong blacksmith whose muscles are used to twist and shape the ferocious tiger being described with descriptions we associate with evil and the Devil representing God as one of fire, muscle, and dread.
• The description's terrible nature is highlighted through punctuation with an exclamation mark, "Dare its deadly terrors clasp!".
• The poet is overwhelmed by the image of a muscular God creating the tiger in a furnace.
• The next-to-last stanza depicts what happened after the tiger was created and unleashed on the earth - "the stars threw down their spears/ And watered heaven with their tears," which personified the stars.
• It is possible that the stars represent heaven's disapproval of God's creation of the tiger as they 'threw down' their spears to try and hunt the tiger down or as a protest against the violence.
• Depending on how you interpret it, the stars are horrified by the animal's creation and weep portraying heavenly sorrow as scary.
• The stanza ends with two questions: "Did he smile his work to see?" and "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" wondering if God was happy when it was created and about how he made the Lamb.
• Lamb is a vegetarian animal that's prey showing how God could create both hunter and hunted.
• The lamb represents Jesus Christ who was innocent and killed as well showing how he made pure and good but was executed.
• This raises the issue of why God created both Jesus and the Devil, goodness and wickedness, victim and perpetrator, hunted and hunter, bullied and bully.
• The idea of God being able to create a world with no cruelty or death is put to the reader's mind but created the tiger.
• The poem ends with the same question it started with suggesting there's no satisfying answer on creating a tiger.
• The speaker focuses on God's careless nature in creating a predator to prey on humanity with the replacement of the word "could" to "dare".