Analysis
"The Tyger" is a poem by English poet and visual artist William Blake. The poem is part of Blake's collection of verses, Songs of Experience. It is Blake's best-known and reprinted poem. The lyrical work has a hypnotic rhyme scheme written largely in catalectic trochaic tetrameter, with occasional lines of iambic tetrameter.
In the poem, the narrator is talking directly to an imaginary tiger. He is asking the tiger a series of questions, but the tiger never responds. The tiger is a powerful creature and the forest is his domain in the same way the Christian God is a powerful entity whose domain is the entirety of creation, including heaven. Religious references and symbolism are heavily present in Blake's poetic works, as well as his artwork.
The poem repeats various terms that describe illumination (e.g. "bright," "fire," "furnace"). The brightness of the tiger is set against a dark backdrop, namely a forest at night. In this context, the tiger is illuminating the dark world. The tiger, then, could be a revolutionary idea, an ingenious concept, or a profound thought illuminating the darkness of the mind.
The tiger can also represent the duality of nature: it is both beautiful and fierce. This is in line with the tiger's symbolism as a representative of God's creation. Both nature and God are forces that cannot be tamed, according to Blake's philosophy. The tiger, then, becomes a metaphysical entity that occupies the hearts and minds of all people.
In any lyric poem, one finds a speaker, and Blake's voice here is that of the bardic prophet he adopts for much of his work in Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The speaker addresses, in an apostrophe, the Tyger, a creature that inspires awe and spiritual terror. Implied as well is the divine creator, who crafted the fearsome tiger to live among humans:
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In addition to this metaphysical creator, the poem alludes seemingly to elements of the Industrial Revolution, a movement that greatly displaced the more pastoral agrarian lifestyle suggested in Blake's earlier poem "The Lamb." The poem suggests that a work of creation such as the tiger must certainly have been created in a divine smithy, which Blake's readers would recognize. Filled with fire and metal and pounding cacophony, this divine production creates a thing of menace. The act of working in these industrial settings damages the worker and the output, which is compared again to the lamb in the companion poem:
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
Ending on the contemplation of a God who could make both Lamb and Tyger, Blake seems to suggest a certain indictment of creation's plan. At the very least, one sees the paradox of a creation designed from the start to set two forces, that of Innocence and that of Experience or Violence, against each other with such uneven odds.
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