to meek, innocent creatures), and Blake questions whether the same God who created Jesus Christ could possibly have created the frightening tiger.

The phrase "fearful symmetry" is a summation of the question that Blake poses, but does not really answer, in the poem. "Symmetry" means the beauty inherent in the excellence or perfection of proportion. The concept of symmetry would not normally be frightening. When Blake adds the adjective "fearful" to symmetry, he suggests something that doesn't fit and that cannot be explained. In other words, he questions the creation of evil by God, when God is supposed to create only beauty and perfection.

What Blake is trying to do here is convey the sheer awe and sense of wonder that the tiger inspires. The tiger is “fearful,” in that it induces fear in all who see it. At the same time, it has “symmetry” in its appearance, a sense of balance and proportion traditionally associated with objects of great beauty. So in other words, Blake presents the tiger as being scary and beautiful at the same time.

As well as being scary and beautiful, the tiger is also sublime. Its savage wildness cannot be neatly contained, or “framed,” as the poem has it. As the tiger emerges from the forests of the night, it isn’t subjected to any boundaries; this is real life, not a painting where the action can be framed. Not even God himself, the “immortal hand or eye,” can control or contain the tiger’s fearsome beauty, which takes on a life of its own.

This is of course perhaps Blake's best known poem, and it is rules by symmetry - between stanzas, between lines and within lines. The most important question to think of when approaching this poem however, is what does the tiger represent, and what might it mean to try and "frame" the tiger's "fearful symmetry"?

The poem suggests two answers and thus proposes a theory of the human and the divine. One approach would be to think that the tiger, like all other beasts and like man himself, has been "framed" by God in his act of creation. However, another way of examining the poem would argue that the responsibility for "framing" the tiger - in the sense of converting him into a work of art - rests not with God but with the poet - and thus we can see this poem being about the role of the poet and his relation with the "untameable" materials of imagination with which he works. Thus some critics that the tiger is a symbol for energy, for a power which, while in one important sense 'symmetrical' - that is to say, perfectly formed - is also beyond all framing or control or capture.

It is this symmetry that Blake is exploring in this amazing poem in a way that explores the tiger's "symmetry" but also transcends it.