Creator's? Clearly, Blake's poem demonstrates his belief that man must witness, examine, and resolve the apparent paradoxes of life. Critic Alfred Kazin writes of Blake,

In "The Tyger," he presents a poem of triumphant human
awareness, and a hymn to pure being.

Additional Source: 

Kazin, Alfred. "Introduction". The Portable Blake. The Viking Portable Library.

The Tyger by William Blake is a poem exploring the nature of the Creator. Throughout the poem, the speaker lists attributes of the tyger and then poses a question about how such a thing could be made. For example, in the fourth stanza, the speaker says:

What the hammer? what the chain,In what furnace was thy brain?What the anvil? what dread grasp,Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

Here, he is questioning what it would take, and who would be able, to create something that strikes fear into those who see it.

The fifth stanza closes on this line: "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" This question helps to illuminate the purpose of the poem, as we understand that the speaker is struggling to believe that a Creator who could fashion something as peaceful and sweet as a lamb could also create something as powerful and deadly as a tiger.

"The Tyger" is an example of Romantic poetry. It was published by William Blake in 1794 during the Romantic Period of British literature, generally considered 1785 - 1830. Three qualities of Romanticism displayed in the poem are strong senses, emotions, and feelings; awe of nature; and the importance of imagination.

"The Tyger" appeals to the senses and is a very emotional poem. References to fire, hammer, anvil, chain, sinews, and furnace create rich visual imagery. Passages such as  "In what distant deeps or skies/ Burnt the fire of thine eyes?" and "When the stars threw down their spears" are quite evocative. The series of rhetorical questions produces emotions such as awe, fear, and doubt. Phrases such as "dare its deadly terrors clasp" and "water'd heaven with their tears" reflect strong feelings in the writer that are duplicated in the reader.

Since the poem examines a living creature in hyperbolic terms, it shows great awe of nature. The tiger seems to take on mythical proportions as the poet questions what kind of Supreme Being could have formed so fierce an animal. 

The poem is also highly imaginative. Rather than just seeing a tiger as a natural phenomenon to be studied scientifically, the poem imagines the power and motivation behind the creative force that produced it. The poem uses metaphor and analogy to compare the forming of the living creature to blacksmithing in some heavenly forge. The poet attributes a heart with twisted sinews beating within the tiger. The advent of the tiger on earth is accompanied by crying stars throwing down their spears. 

Because it displays strong senses and emotions, an awe of nature, and powerful imagination, "The Tyger" can be classified as a Romantic poem.

“The Tyger” is one of the most famous poems by Blake from his Songs of Experience. It forms a parallel to “The Lamb” from Songs of Innocence. Copious interpretations of “The Tyger” reflect a complexity of its central image. Most scholars concur that the tiger personifies the rage of destruction.

Just as “The Lamb,” “The Tyger” opens with a question about the one who created him. In the earlier poem, the answer is obvious. “The Tyger”, on the other hand, represents a chain of questions that are left unanswered.

In Songs of Innocence, ferocious beasts epitomize the force inimical to the Lamb, hence, to God. Here, however, Blake edits his perception by showing unalloyed fascination with the tiger’s sinister beauty. Who created the tiger? “In what distant deeps or skies burnt the fire of thine eyes?” Is this a heavenly or an infernal fire? This is the main question of the poem.

Blake does not give a direct answer to it. But the logic of the poem may bring the reader to the idea that this wonderful beast was created by some entity other than God. Maybe, the devil himself. The question of the first stanza has the verb could, “What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?” The last stanza, repeating the same question, employs the verb dare instead. Obviously, the shift is from the idea of power and ability to that of challenge and defiance.

The tiger, though he may be a creation of the infernal power, elicits not only fear but also fascination with his “fearful symmetry.” He is not bad in the banal sense of the word. Rather, he encapsulates the amazing energy that moves everything in Blake’s cosmos. So this poem becomes an illustration of the theological theme which later becomes known as theodicy, a vindication of God’s goodness in view of the presence of evil in the universe.

William Blake wrote two corresponding sets of verses called "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience." In "Songs of Innocence," Blake looked on life as if through the eyes of a child; he presented an innocent, trusting, and optimistic viewpoint on his subjects. In "Songs of Experience," on the other hand, he presented the same or similar topics from a mature, pessimistic, and even dark perspective. In this way, by showing two contrasting sides to a topic, he believed the real truth could be better perceived. 

"The Tyger" is a Song of Experience; its corresponding poem is "The Lamb." "The Lamb" presents God as the Lamb of God, an image that is sweet and comforting; the poem is written as if a little child were addressing a lamb. "The Tyger" is best understood in comparison with "The Lamb." In "The Tyger," God is presented as something like a powerful mad scientist, forging in his heavenly "furnace" a beast ruthless and deadly. The Tyger is a symbol of violence, oppression, and fear. The multiple questions to the Tyger about who made it leave the impression that the speaker is blaming God for the evil and pain that exists in the world and questioning the motives of such a Creator. 

It would be a mistake to say that Blake's purpose in writing "The Tyger" was to show that God is the source of pain and violence in the world, just as it would be a mistake to assume that Blake's purpose in writing "The Lamb" was to convert people to a belief in Jesus Christ. Blake's purpose in writing the TWO poems was to show the contrasting sides of God in hopes of developing a fuller understanding of who God really is.

Blake's philosophy and religious beliefs form one of the greatest puzzles in literature. Blake seems to celebrate both the positive and negative forces in the universe, to believe both sides are equally the intentional creations of God, despite also conveying, at crucial points, an almost pacifistic message that rejects the violence and retribution implied in traditional religion alongside God's mercy. The title animal of "The Tyger" represents an ambiguous but dangerous force that exists in the world. The tiger could symbolize the warlike elements within mankind, or perhaps within God and the universe as a whole. It's as if God has caused the tiger to arise, but inexplicably so:

What immortal hand or eye
Could frame they fearful symmetry?

Why, Blake asks, would God create something so uncontrolled as this beast? But, does the tiger genuinely represent a negative force? Its "symmetry" would appear a quality of perfection, perhaps in distinction to the flawed nature of both man and most of the world that surrounds him. But the tiger above all represents power, a kind of ruthlessness Blake implies is necessary in the formation of a complete world and of the complete being that man strives to be.

In my view, the most striking lines are the fifth stanza:

When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?

The allusion to tears suggests that heaven regrets having created the tiger. It's the opposite of the lamb, the symbol at the center of traditional Christian belief. Yet God purposely brought the tiger into existence, though in some sense Blake is leaving this an open question, as if he cannot fathom that the tiger was allowed to come into being:

What the hammer, what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?

Everywhere in Blake's work we see dichotomies but also the insistence that opposites must somehow be joined together to form a complete and valid universe. The "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" is perhaps the most significant title of all his works that expresses his philosophy. His "Songs of Innocence" embody only a superficial set of meanings until amplified by the "Songs of Experience."

It is hard to escape the suspicion that the gentler forms of expression throughout Blake's writings are stated ironically, as if to parody the traditional sentiments forming the basis of moral behavior. He mildly addresses the lamb, in asking, "Dost thou know who made thee?" while in "The Tyger" he seems in a frenzy of discovery and realization, announcing that this is the real world, not the mercy and gentleness of the lamb. Probably, however, the definitive point of Blake's work is a theme that merges these diametrically opposed ideas and feelings, one side of which is represented so characteristically and forcefully in "The Tyger."

In the first stanza, the tiger is "fearful." The word "dread" is repeated three times in the poem. The tiger is associated with fear, dread, and terror. Clearly, the speaker is describing the tiger as something to be feared. This leads one to suppose other associations, such as violence or perhaps even evil. 

Note that in the fifth stanza, Blake invokes fallen angels and/or The Fall of Adam and Eve. This suggests that the tiger was created with or after The Fall. Therefore, the tiger comes after the fall from paradise. The tiger is born with the world of sin and experience. The tiger is coeval with the notions of original sin and the first experiences of fallen humanity. In this same stanza, the speaker asks if the same God created both the tiger and the lamb. The lamb is associated with Christ and peace. So, the speaker wonders if the same God could or would create two things so vastly different. The lamb is peace and love and the tiger represents ferocity and violence. Some interpret this poem to be a meditation on God's mysterious ways. Why would an omniscient or all-loving God create a world capable of something so violent? And generally speaking, why would an all-loving God create the potential for violence and suffering? 

The "Tyger" is the dominant image of the poem, and the language which Blake uses to describe the animal often connotes fire (e.g., "burning bright," "Burnt the fire of thine eyes," "dare seize the fire"), which in turn connotes passion and vitality. The color of the tiger also stands out in stark contrast to the darkness of "the night," so that the connotations of fire, vitality and passion are emphasized even more.

Later in the poem, in stanza four, there is industrial, machine imagery, such as "the hammer," "the chain," a "furnace" and "the anvil." The language is part of a metaphor where the speaker imagines that the tiger must have been created in the blistering heat of a furnace, and that it must have been the product of great force, hence the hammer and the anvil. The implication is that the tiger's color and the intensity of "the fire of (its) eyes" is such that it seems only possible that it emerged from such intense conditions.

There is also imagery throughout the poem linking to the creator who the speaker cannot imagine to be responsible for creating the tiger. The speaker wonders, incredulously, "What immortal hand or eye" can possibly have created something like this "burning bright" tiger. The hand of any such creator is referenced throughout the poem, and the personification in this instance allows the reader to appreciate how difficult it must have been for any creator to have handled the fire from which the tiger must have been formed. We can all remember or imagine what it feels like to be burned, and so when the speaker wonders, "What the hand, dare seize the fire?" we, the readers, can better understand why the speaker is so reluctant to believe that the tiger could have been created by any hand. Instead, as the speaker suggests, it seems more likely that the tiger must have been created in a furnace.

A poem about the nature of divine creation, Blake's "The Tyger" investigates the notion of creative intent and inspiration in a rather original religious context. The poem also invites us to consider what it is, exactly, that the tyger symbolizes - what significance do we find in the tyger as a counterpart to the lamb?

Perhaps the most telling line of Blake's "The Tyger" comes at the end of the fifth stanza: "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?"

“'The Tyger' is a Blakean song of experience that is to be contrasted with its contrary song of innocence, entitled 'The Lamb.' Questions also recur in 'The Lamb': 'Little Lamb, who made thee?/ Dost thou know who made thee?'” (eNotes).

Blake's poem poses a series of questions that appear direct yet which are not easily answered. How are we to understand or envision a creative force that is manifested in the form of a terrifying beast? 

"'The Tyger' is about the divinity and mysterious beauty of all creation and its transcendence of the limited human perspective of good and evil that the miseries of human experience condition one to assume" (eNotes).

Importantly, Blake's poem invites us to reflect on the limits of our own perspectives and our own moral vision. We might read "The Tyger" as being about both divine creation and artistic creation, about a cosmic will and about human will as well. 

The poet who penned "The Lamb" also created "The Tyger." Seen in this light, Blake's questions take on a rhetorical significance within the poems themselves, referring to his own creative process even while the poems also touch on notions of the nature of divine creation.

One way to rephrase Blake's questions in "The Tyger" is to ask what aspects of divine will are reflected in the tyger? If the tyger is a product of a divine creative force, what does that say about the nature of the divine creative force?

Reality, for William Blake, is something that supercedes simple moral categories. 

"The mystery of reality does not lend itself to simple, pat formulations of everyday statements" (eNotes).

In his metaphysics, the energetic forces of life (which include creativity, art, and greater passions too) cannot be honestly held back by the arbitrary constraints of religious doctrine. The "mind-forged manacles" of categorical social thought function as illusory, ideological distortions of a larger, clearer truth.

Blake's "The Tyger" leads us to ask whether or not the lamb and the tyger really are so different after all. If they are both manifestations of the same creative force, might it be best and most accurate to see them for their similarities instead of focusing on their differences?

As symbols, these two animals superficially seem to represent two different sets of ideas. Yet Blake's poetry, taken as a whole, suggests that this is only a superficial symbolic difference and that in a final account the tyger and the lamb represent exactly the same thing.  

William Blake was a metaphysical poet, meaning that his poems often held connotations about the deeper questions of life and the meaning of existence. I like that you have have asked about "connotations" in plural form, for a poem or any piece of literature can have multiple connotations. A connotation is the deeper meaning the reader takes from the work; it does not have to reflect the connotation the writer hoped to impart--as long as it is based on an accurate reading of the text. 

To draw connotations from "The Tyger," it's helpful to compare it to its matching poem. Blake wrote "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience," two collections of poetry that demonstrated his belief that "without contraries is no progression." Often two separate poems will have the same title, such as "The Chimney Sweeper" or "Holy Thursday." Such pairings represent contrasting views of the same subject, the first viewed from the perspective of "innocence" and the second viewed from the perspective of "experience." "The Tyger" is a song of experience, while its contrary is "The Lamb," a song of innocence. 

"The Lamb" presents the soft side of God and His loving kindness. "The Tyger" shows a Creator who has made a dangerous, ferocious beast and questions, "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" The tiger is described as possessing "fearful symmetry" with a brain filled with "deadly terrors." It can be taken as the representation of cruelty and violence, or, in a word, Evil. The question the poem poses, then, is: Did God create Evil? If not, where did it come from? If he did, then perhaps we need to rethink who God is. Thus, one connotation is that as a person matures and grapples with the reality of evil in the world, he or she begins to question his or her childhood faith in God.

However, those who hold to an orthodox Christian worldview can find a different connotation in the poem. Christians are very comfortable with the way "The Lamb" presents God, noting that "He is called by thy name," meaning that Jesus Christ was known as "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29). But the Bible also teaches that "our God is a consuming fire" (Hebrews 12:29). In Romans 11:22, the Apostle Paul urges Christians to "consider therefore the kindness and sternness of God." Christians see in these two poems a validation of those two sides of God, and they find their faith strengthened rather than weakened by the comparison. 

Removing the question of religion, one could also take as a connotation the idea of maturing or gaining experience. An adult needs to be aware of the dangers of the world and leave naive notions of the innate goodness of mankind and the world behind. This would support the view of Naturalism: that a cruel and uncaring natural world over which one has no control wields great, even ultimate, power in this life. 

The penetrating questions posed by "The Tyger" have intrigued thoughtful people for over two centuries, encouraging us to explore the topics of God, Nature, good, and Evil.

William Blake's poem “The Tyger” was an early work from the British Romantic era. Blake included the poem, along with some original illustrations (he was an artist, too), in a poetry collection called Songs of Innocence.

As a Romantic poet, Blake often writes about mystery and the supernatural. His description of the Tyger reflects this. The first stanza of the poem reads:

Tyger, Tyger burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

After reading these brief but powerful lines, we already know a lot about this Tyger. He is no ordinary “tiger,” as the “burning bright” reference reveals. What kind of tiger would burn brightly? Later in the poem we will find out that this Tyger's eyes were made by an immortal creator from fire.

The term symmetry refers to the Tyger's physical or spiritual being, depending on how we think of it. Is the Tyger physically real? Or is he an immortal being of some kind, such as the angel that eventually became Satan? Either way, we know he is scary and formidable, because he is described as “fearful,” even in the presence of an “immortal hand or eye.”

Later in the poem Blake will make a reference to the rebellious angels' revolt in heaven. The implication is that this Tyger was one of them, and probably the leader, Lucifer.

In "The Tyger," William Blake uses the first two lines to introduce the subject of the poem. It is about the tiger that burns brightly "in the forests of the night." These lines suggest the tiger's bright coloration, its habitat, and its nocturnal habits. They also hint at how dangerous and frightening it is by referring to fire and darkness.

Then the poet begins a series of questions about how the tiger came into existence. "What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" asks about what god could create something so beautiful yet so dangerous.

Blake's "The Tyger" appears in his Songs of Innocence and Experience as a song of "experience." These poems appear to be nursery rhymes, but in fact the idea at work behind Blake's "innocence and experience" dichotomy has to do with the nature of good and evil, and God's relationship to man.

In the case of "The Tyger," the theme is essentially expressed as a question in the first stanza, "What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" (l. 2-4) In other words, what are we mortals to infer about God (the "immortal hand or eye") given the dreadful nature of the tiger?

The next three stanzas simply rephrase this question over and over, with ever escalating language. The images in this section of the poem compare God to a blacksmith, fashioning the tiger (and, presumably, all creation) at the forge:

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp? (l. 13-16)

Stanza five turns the question around, asking to know if God "smiled his work to see," suggesting that might have taken a perverse joy in creating a deadly animal. The final stanza returns to the question posed originally, only rephrasing it as "What immortal hand or eye / Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?" By substituting the word "dare" for the more neutral "could" of the first stanza, the poet clearly is expressing outrage at the existence of evil in the world, and challenging the moral authority of God.

Poetic elements used in the poem "The Tyger" by English writer William Blake include:

Rhyme

In each stanza of this poem, the first two lines rhyme and the last two lines rhyme. The rhyme scheme in each stanza is AABB. Blake employs rhyme to give a musical quality to the poem. Rhyme also enables a reader to memorize a poem more easily.

Theme

The main theme of this poem is the magnificent creation that a tiger (tyger) is. William Blake wonders about the fact that the God who created the Lamb (Jesus Christ) was also the Creator of this formidable beast of the jungle. Blake sees great creative powers in this majestic animal.

Repetition

To give the poem more power and to emphasize the strength of the tiger, Blake repeats the words “what” and “dread.”

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp,

Style

Blake employs a formal writing style in "The Tyger." The poem has a solid structure as opposed to a more freewheeling "free verse" poem. The poem consists of six stanzas of four lines each. The above-mentioned rhyme scheme is part of every stanza. Each line of the poem has four beats to it as well, which gives this poem a regular, consistent rhythm, which is also a poetic element.

In "The Tyger," Blake takes time to ruminate on what kind of God could make a creature as fearsome as a tiger. In doing so, he employs an eighteenth-century concept known as "the sublime." The sublime refers to those aspects of nature that both fill us with awe at their beauty but also with terror at their power. Standing at the edge of a tall mountain peak and seeing both the majesty of the mountain while recognizing the smallness and weakness of humans in comparison to the God who could create such grandeur would be an example of the sublime.

Blake describes the tiger in terms of the sublime: it is both beautiful and terrifying. As Blake asks:

What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

“The Tyger” by William Blake was published in his book Songs of Innocence and of Experience  in 1794. The poem is 24 lines long, divided into six quatrains. It is written in iambic tetrameter. The quatrains each consist of two couplets, meaning that they rhyme AABB. The first and sixth quatrains are identical. 

The poem is written in the voice of a narrator who addresses the "Tyger" in the second person. One unusual aspect of the poem is that is consists mainly of a series of questions addressed to the Tyger rather than declarative statements. 

The poem uses a significant amount of religious symbolism, synthesizing traditional Christian iconography with Blake's own idiosyncratic belief system. The narrator seems to be querying the Tyger in part to understand the nature of the Creator, wondering what sort of Creator could account for the Tyger's beauty, majesty, and ferocity. The narrator also struggles to understand how a single Creator could have made something as fierce as the Tyger and as gentle as the Lamb. 

It is difficult to put elements of "The Tyger" into "like/dislike" categories, a process which oversimplifies a complex poem. That being said, I like the language of the poem. For example:

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

I find "twist the sinews of thy heart" a powerful image because it packs so much into very few words. First, I get a strong visual image of God as a blacksmith with powerful arms twisting the "metal" that makes the tiger's heart. This is a "touch" image as well as a sight image to me: I can feel the painful twisting motion. Further, the word "twist" also means deformed or perverse: twisting the tiger's heart carries with it a connotation that there might be something wrong with the tiger's predatory, ruthless nature. Overall, too, the stark, simple language of the poem conveys the frightening power of the tiger and the God who made it.

However, I don't like—and this may be a personal quirk—the fact that Blake never mentions the tiger's stripes and what they represent, which is the ability of the tiger to camouflage itself and leap on its prey undetected. This is an integral part of the tiger's power and predation. People will tell me that would detract from the poem's stark, simple point, and they would be right, but I don't like it. This may seem an inane response, but it points to the more important question of critical engagement with a work of literature: it is OK for us—and in fact helpful—to explore how and why a "great" work might disappoint our expectations.

More profoundly, and this is intended on Blake's part, I don't like the feelings of discomfort it raises in me when I have to contemplate Blake's fundamental question: Why is there good and evil in the world? Why did God create both gentleness and ruthlessness? These are questions we try to avoid, and Blake forces us to face them.

The tyger is a "fearful" beast. In the first stanza, the speaker asks what "immortal hand or eye" (God) could have created him. In the fourth stanza, the speaker uses the metaphor of God as a blacksmith creating the tyger (tiger). Being born of fire and steel, the tiger is, in Blake's descriptions, something strong and fierce. In the following stanza, the speakers asks if the tiger's creator was happy about his creation: 

Did he smile his work to see? 
Did he who made the lamb make thee? 

The speaker asks if God ("he"), who made the lamb, also made the tiger. The lamb represents peace and love. The lamb is often symbolically synonymous with Christ in Christian theology. So, the speaker is asking if God could create something so loving (the lamb) and yet also create something so dangerous and ferocious. There are no answers to the speaker's questions. This leaves the poem open to different interpretations. Perhaps God did make both peaceful and dangerous things in the world to create a balance and an analogue with the good/evil dichotomy. Perhaps the tiger (or other dangerous and evil things the tiger represents) was created by a fallen angel, a demiurge, or a devil. The speaker can only ponder. 

Consider a gross simplification. The speaker asks who created the tiger and why. This echoes similar questions such as: If God is loving, why did he create suffering? Blake goes much deeper in terms of theological and philosophical questions. But the general idea concerns how and why the world contains love and hate, good and evil, peace and destruction. 

I appreciate (pun intended) your interest in a “critical appreciation” of William Blake’s poem “The Tyger.”  Too often these days, there is such a strong stress on extracting “meaning” from a poem that there is too little emphasis on appreciating a poem’s skill, craftsmanship, and beauty.  If Blake’s primary purpose had been to express a particular “meaning,” he could easily have written an essay.  Instead, he chose to write a poem – a use of language in which writers call strong attention to language itself.

Therefore, in trying to answer your question, I will try to call attention to some of the specific literary devices used in this poem and will be concerned only secondarily with the poem’s “meaning.” Of course, literary techniques cannot be divorced from literary meaning; form and content and finally inseparable. Nevertheless, let’s try to concentrate here on your word “appreciation.”  There is much indeed to appreciate in this poem, including the following:

• The heavy alliteration of line 1: “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright!
• The ominous imagery of line 2: “In the forests of the night . . . .”
• The fact that the next two lines do not merely make a statement but rather pose a question that forces the reader to think:

What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? (3-4)

• The fact that the next two lines (5-6) echo the structure of lines 3 and 4 (both sets of lines are two-line questions), thus contributing to the poem’s unity and symmetry.
• The fact that the questions become shorter and more rapid in lines 6-7, thus contributing to the increasingly urgent pace of the poem.
• The fact that line 9 is nicely balanced in structure: “And what shoulder & what art . . . .”
• The fact that Blake in line 10 uses assonance, just as he elsewhere uses alliteration: “Could twist the sinews of thy heart . . . .”
• The fact that lines 9-10 and 11-12 are balanced pairs of questions that look back to the similar balance of lines 3 and 4 and also lines 5 and 6, not to mention the different kind of balance achieved in the single-line questions of lines 7 and 8.
• The fact that line 12 echoes the structure of line 9 and thus gives an even greater sense of balance, order, and symmetry to the poem than it had already achieved.
• The way the flood of short, urgent questions (such as those in line 13) contribute to the rapid rhythm of the poem.
• The way lines 15-16 combine two earlier kinds of question-asking (brief and longer).
• The way lines 17-18 provide a bit of a break from all the questions, so that the poem does not seem monotonous and predictable.
• The symmetry of lines 19-20.
• The way the final stanza echoes the opening stanza (thus adding to the poem’s symmetry) while also making a suggestive and significant change (from “Could” to “Dare” [4, 24]).

This kind of close reading of the poem helps call attention to many of the features of the work that make it a piece of literature, not merely a propagandistic expression of a pre-packaged idea.

"The Tyger" is a poem written by William Blake for his collection "Songs of Innocence and Experience." These poems support Blake's conviction that "without contraries there is no progression." The "Songs of Innocence" contrast with the "Songs of Experience"; only by understanding each of the contraries can one arrive at a full understanding, according to Blake's view. Therefore, to understand the meaning of "The Tyger," you must read and understand its companion poem, which is "The Lamb." "The Lamb" presents God as a loving Creator who is "meek and mild," "became a little child," and sacrificed himself as the Lamb of God. 

"The Tyger," on the other hand, presents God as an inscrutable, distant, almost mechanical force that created a dangerous and deadly animal, the tiger, and unleashed it upon the world. The poem's series of rhetorical questions spur the reader to question the traditional view of God as loving and gentle toward mankind. It does not accuse God of being evil, but it poses some questions about the Creator's motivations in making the tiger, which can represent calamity and misfortune. 

Taking the two poems as a pair, then, you can see that "The Tyger" lays out the question that people of faith still struggle with. If God is a loving Creator, how can he allow such bad things to happen in the world? As soon as that question is posed, a contrary appears, namely that God makes good things happen, as well, and in fact he became a man and sacrificed himself (as a "Lamb") to redeem a fallen world. These two contraries may be impossible to reconcile, but by considering both, there is "progression" of thought, and perhaps even of faith. 

Trying to discuss Blake's "point" in writing "The Tyger" requires that we understand Blake's intention in composing the poem, and we can only guess at a poet's intention--unless we have his own statement about why he wrote a particular poem.  But we can, based on what we know of Blake from his works, try to understand the meaning of the poem.

"The Tyger," which is part of a group of poems called Songs of Experience (1794), is a counterpoint to an earlier collection of poems, Songs of Innocence (1789), in which we find "The Lamb."  In both poems, Blake is asking the same question--that is, "What kind of God made you the way you are?"  In "The Lamb," for example, Blake indicates that the Lamb's creator is "called by thy name,/For he calls himself a Lamb" (ll. 13-15).  This is clearly a reference to Christ, who is often referred to as "the lamb of God."  The same question in "The Tyger" elicits the question, "What immortal hand or eye/Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?"

Both poems question who the creator is, but in "The Tyger," the creator is no longer assumed to be a Christ-like figure who is capable of creating something as gentle as a lamb.  Rather, the tiger's creator is much more powerful:

And what shoulder, and what art,/Could twist the sinews of thy heart? . . . In what furnace was the brain?/What the anvil? what dread grasp/Dare its deadly terrors clasp? (ll. 9-16)

Blake is essentially describing a god who forges the tiger, almost as if the tiger were a mechanism, rather than one who "gave thee [the lamb] life and bid thee feed." (l. 3 of "The Lamb")  The god who created the lamb--described as meek and mild--has become a strong, fierce god who, in his "dread grasp," is capable of creating something that reflects his own strength and fierceness.  The god who makes the tiger is no longer a gentle, loving god, and breathes life into his creation, but a god who creates with a hammer and chain and must use his "dread grasp" to make such a fearsome creature as the tiger. 

By implication, then, Blake is saying that the god who creates something as fierce as a tiger must be even fiercer than his creation, no longer capable of creating innocent things like lambs.    By the time Blake wrote Songs of Experience, he was convinced that English society--from the church to the government to the individual--was falling apart, and this sense of impending doom informs "The Tyger."  His poetic vision of the dissolution of society is "The Tyger" and not "The Lamb."

The poem "The Tyger" by William Blake is a celebration of the terrible and frightening beauty of the tiger and an expression of wonderment that the same God who made a gentle creature like the lamb could also make a dreadful creature like the tiger. Blake's poem is comprised of a series of questions and ends in ambiguity. The poet cannot bring himself to make a definitive affirmative statement that the same God made these two disparate beasts.

In the original engraving that accompanies "The Tyger," the poem dominates the left and center, and a large tree runs down the right side. The tiger is at the bottom of the painting, its left forefoot and right rear foot extending, in a pose that suggests strength and suppleness. The tiger has overlarge eyes and head and is looking off to the left.

Blake's engraving is the same throughout various editions of the poem, but the colors vary from the versions in editions of Songs of Experience (1794) and Songs of Innocence and Experience (1795). All versions show at least a hint of orange and black stripes on the tiger's back.

The engraved illustration that Blake composed to accompany his poem is intended to hint at the tiger's "fearful symmetry," suggest the fire of its eyes, and allude to its dreadful spirit that is "burning bright." Blake intends to impart the wildness and cruelty of the tiger. However, as an article in The Guardian states, in eighteenth-century London, tigers were exotic rarities, and the only model that Blake had to work from was a tiger cub that was on exhibition in London. That's why the head and eyes are too large for the body—because Blake was working from an immature example.

I love this poem, and its counterpart, "The Lamb".  The Tyger is a poem from the Songs of Experience (how the world effects us as we grow older and have experiences); the Lamb from the Songs of Innocence (how we are before the world gets hold of us and turns us into something other than innocent). 

The format is a question and answer format where the speaker begins with a question to the tiger--Who created you?  The speaker wonders how the horrible heart of the tiger began to beat, and compares it to the blacksmith (a dirty job).  The speaker wants to know if the creator smiled when he finished created the tiger, and could this creator be the same one who created the lamb?

There is a hammering rhythm, which again underscores the comparison with a blacksmith.  The Tiger is a beautiful but deadly creature (he burns bright)...so how can the same creator make both the tiger and the lamb?  What kind of God would put both animals on this earth?

The poem is full of unanswered questions about the complexity of creation and the speaker is obviously in awe and wonder of the sheer magnitude of God's power.  The mood is one of open awe of both God and the Tiger's brute strength.

The blacksmith, too, is a "creator".  He is creative, artistic, and skilled. Blake uses words like "dare" and "could" in his poem to represent the risk of creating "art" as a blacksmith.  It is a dangerous and dirty job, but one that is fulfilling.  He risks fire, injury to his lungs and body, to create and do his job daily. 

The tiger, perhaps, is the voice of violence and revolution in the world.  No longer innocent like the lamb, but demanding more beauty and fairness...brutally taken, if necessary.  There is an element of fear mixed in with the awe.

Six stanzas, rhyming couplets (some are more sight or near rhyme than exact rhyme), in a sing-song pattern which helps to give this dangerous fear a bit more lightness.  However, the hard consonants and hammering rhythm of the blacksmith bring us the reality of life...it's not all child's play and innocence like The Lamb.

The most prominent way to critically analyze William Blake's poem "The Tyger" is to examine the messages and questions which Blake poses in the poem.

For example, the most prominent question (which remains unanswered by Blake) is how could God, the all-perfect and creator of goodness and innocence, have created a creature which is seen as violent and evil?

The poem, therefore, is meant to raise awareness of a reader in regards to God's thoughts and reasoning behind his creation of the different animals on earth. While the poem specifically speaks to the creation of the Tyger, one can easily come to question the creation of disease, natural disasters, and other "evil" things as well.

Basically, Blake is wanting readers to see why things exist as they do. He wants readers to question life. He wants them to think about things instead of simply accepting them based solely upon blind faith.

Before reading "The Tyger", I would strongly suggest reading "The Lamb", also by Blake.  “The Lamb” by William Blake is a direct commentary of God. The speaker repeatedly asks the lamb, who is described in favorable and, what we would call, cute terms, who made him. The speaker describes the lamb’s voice and disposition as sweet and kind. These descriptions move on to make an allusion to Jesus in the second stanza. The lamb itself has often been a reference to Jesus in literature. The speaker points out that God (of whom Jesus is a part of) came back to earth as a baby.

Think of “The Tyger” as a companion to “The Lamb”. Again, the speaker asks who has made the tiger, even going so far as to ask if it is possible that the same immortal being made the lamb. The purpose of this poem is more wondrous than the lamb. There are dark allusions to the fire of the tiger’s eyes and the dark, far place it was created in. There is also a beauty in the fearsome tiger which identified by the speaker. The speaker is commenting, overall, on the far reaching and diverse creations of God.