Category: The Tyger

William Blake’s literary masterpiece, ‘The Tyger’ has been scrutinized from literal and metaphorical points of view as he revisits his preferred dilemmas of innocence vs. experience. As for God, his creations are just beautiful and transcend the notions of good-evil. As is the case with his earlier poems, ‘The Tyger’ gives no visible answers except to offer more questions.

Though ‘The Tyger’ is specifically about how the nature of God’s creation can be reconciled with the existence of the fearsome tiger, it’s also about creativity more generally. Everything about the creation of the tiger suggests effort, skill, artistry, and imagination on the creator’s part, suggesting that these qualities are necessary to create anything as frighteningly beautiful as the tiger. What’s more, the speaker also hints that good creation — in art, for example—needs to incorporate this more dangerous and intimidating side of the world. Without that complexity, the poem suggests, a work of art won’t be fully honest and authentic.

The poem is itself, of course, the product of intense creativity. Blake revised and revised this poem, trying to pin it down to the exact form that best embodies its complicated questions. This artistry is mirrored by some of the word choices made throughout. For example, the ‘framing’ of ‘symmetry’ (lines 4 and 24) suggests a visual artist or engraver (like Blake himself) making sure the proportions of a project are correct. This type of language, which characterizes creativity as both effort and skill, is also found in the third and fourth stanzas. The fourth stanza in particular describes a metal workshop, where beautiful things are made under intensely hot and pressured conditions.

Along these lines, it’s also important to note the way in which the creation of the tiger is consistently linked with fire. Indeed, the tiger itself is a kind of fiery creature, testament to the intense imagination with which it was created. Imagination itself is characterized as a kind of fire from which things can be created, if the creator is brave, strong, and skilled enough. There may even be an allusion to the Greek myth of Prometheus here, who tricked the gods, stealing fire and giving it to humanity. However, Prometheus was not rewarded for his ingenuity; instead, he was condemned to eternal punishment.

The imagination, the poem ultimately suggests, is the location of a miraculous but dangerous kind of creative strength. That’s why it takes bravery—the willingness to ‘dare,’ as the poem would put it—to create anything of any worth out of the ‘fire’ of creativity. This interpretation of creativity certainly rings true with the story of Blake’s life: for all his commitment, effort, and genius, he was thought of more as a madman than a visionary during his lifetime.

‘The Tyger’ is arguably the most famous poem written by William Blake (1757-1827); it’s difficult to say which is more well-known, ‘The Tyger’ or the poem commonly known as ‘Jerusalem’. The poem’s opening line, ‘Tyger Tyger, burning bright’ is among the most famous opening lines in English poetry (it’s sometimes modernised as ‘Tiger, Tiger, burning bright’). Below is this iconic poem, followed by a brief but close analysis of the poem’s language, imagery, and meaning.

‘The Tyger’ was first published in William Blake’s 1794 volume Songs of Experience, which contains many of his most celebrated poems. The Songs of Experience was designed to complement Blake’s earlier collection, Songs of Innocence (1789), and ‘The Tyger’ should be seen as the later volume’s 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 Blake’s speaker wondering about the creator responsible for such a fearsome creature as the tiger. The fiery imagery used throughout the poem conjures the tiger’s aura of danger: fire equates to fear. Don’t get too close to the tiger, Blake’s poem seems to say, otherwise you’ll 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 creature’s 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 tiger’s 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 Blake’s 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 Blake’s mythology) who utters it; Urizen’s fall, and the fall of the stars and planets, are what brought about the creation of life on Earth in Blake’s 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 can’t 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 Blake’s reference to ‘fearful symmetry’: he is describing not only the remarkable patterns on the tiger’s 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 Blake’s poetry, Blake’s 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, I’ll 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 Blake’s Tyger? Returning to the significance of fire in the poem, it’s 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, man’s development followed. Once man had fire, he was free, and had the divine spark (literally, in being able to create fire). Blake’s 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.

‘The Tyger’ is a poem by visionary English poet William Blake, and is often said to be the most widely anthologized poem in the English language. It consists entirely of questions about the nature of God and creation, particularly whether the same God that created vulnerable beings like the lamb could also have made the fearsome tiger. The tiger becomes a symbol for one of religion’s most difficult questions: why does God allow evil to exist? At the same time, however, the poem is an expression of marvel and wonder at the tiger and its fearsome power, and by extension the power of both nature and God.

Like its sister poem, “The Lamb,” “The Tyger” expresses awe at the marvels of God’s creation, represented here by a tiger. But the tiger poses a problem: everything about it seems to embody fear, danger, and terror. In a series of questions, the speaker of “The Tyger” wonders whether this creature was really created by the same God who made the world’s gentle and joyful creatures. And if the tiger was created by God, why did God choose to create such a fearsome animal? Through the example of the tiger, the poem examines the existence of evil in the world, asking the same question in many ways: if God created everything and is all-powerful, why does evil exist?

The speaker tries to reconcile the tiger’s frightening nature with the idea of a loving God, but this attempt leads only to a series of seemingly unanswerable questions. The tiger is presented as an impressive figure and seems to be part of God’s design for the world. It “burns brightly” and has a “symmetry,” a quality which Blake often associates with beauty and purposeful intent on God’s part. But that “symmetry” is also “fearful.” The tiger seems designed to kill and inflict pain. In other words, the tiger behaves in a way that seems counter to God’s laws and ethics. The tiger’s association with fire (“burning brightly,” for example) underscores this point—it’s visually impressive but dangerous to get close to.

The poem then meditates on the specific moment of the tiger’s creation (“when thy heart began to beat”). It questions God’s motivations in making the tiger, even considering the possibility that it wasn’t actually God who made the tiger. The speaker struggles to understand how a God that made the small, vulnerable lamb could also choose to make a being that would surely eat the lamb given half a chance. In other words, the speaker struggles to understand why God would create something that seems to have destruction as its very purpose.

The poem leaves this line of questioning unanswered, though the questions are themselves made very clear and stark. They are, essentially, handed over to the reader to consider; the speaker doesn’t know for sure why God has created something that seems evil. However, by detailing the tiger’s fearsomeness and by directly comparing it to the innocent and gentle lamb, the poem hints that perhaps both creatures are necessary parts of God’s creation. That is, perhaps the majesty of God’s work requires these kinds of oppositional forces. By giving the tiger the same kind of consideration as the lamb, the speaker suggests that without fear and danger, there could be no love and joy.

Opposites run throughout Blake’s work—innocence and experience, the city and nature, childhood and adulthood—and so the tiger and the lamb can be seen as part of this pattern. In order for God to fully express his divinity, he has to create elements of the world that go beyond the understanding of humanity. God proves its power precisely because He acts in ways that humanity cannot fully comprehend.

The poem, then, is a deeply complex set of questions that have no easy answers. There is no doubt, though, that the poem wants its reader to consider the way in which the world seems to contain both good and evil—to acknowledge these contradictory forces and question why they exist, even though the answers may never be clear.