Indeed, fear, violence, and threat all seemed to be on the minds of people in the 1700s. Although, you might ask: in what century were people not worried about those things?

Another main feature of the eighteenth century was nature. We note the eighteenth century's preoccupation with nature in the works of Rousseau and the English poet Alexander Pope. Blake, too, reflects this feature of the eighteenth century when he includes "the stars" and "the forests of the night."

Another feature of the eighteenth century was revolution. Near the end of the 1700s, we had the French Revolution, which saw the overthrow and execution of the French king and queen. We wonder if the tiger might not be planning a revolution. Lines like "On what wings dare he aspire?" make us think that Blake's tiger could be up to something.

"The Tyger" by William Blake is a major example of the Romantic Movement's reaction against the eighteenth century Age of Enlightenment. Enlightenment authors had exalted "Man" and, in particular, "his" rationality, over and against the medieval emphasis, in art, literature, and philosophy, on divine mystery. For them, the supreme expression of human reason was the progressive, onward march of civilization, culminating in the modern, secular, democratic, nation-state which the French Revolution would come to put into practice.

Romantics like Blake (and, along with him, Byron, Shelley, and others) came to be disillusioned with these Enlightenment ideals and turned, instead of Man, to nature, instead of reason, to emotion, and, instead of the progress of civilization, to that which is primordial, in order to encounter the sublime. A careful analysis of "The Tyger" can find all three of these themes woven through the poem. Stanzas 2, 3, and 4 speak to the limitations of human agency by listing aspects or body parts of the Tyger and demonstrating how each one exceeds a corresponding human capacity.

Here, Nature is demonstrated to be a place where "Man" necessarily encounters something/someone that exceeds "him," that "he" cannot control. Paradoxically, this, rather than the achievements of human reason, is the site where "Man" encounters the sublime: the final stanzas of the poem make clear that, to encounter the natural limits of human agency, to encounter in Nature something that "Man" could not make or control, even if "he" wanted to, is to encounter God.

That the Tyger is powerful is what makes it beautiful, and that beauty has something primal, and therefore something sacred about it. This primal beauty is not undercut, but rather intensified, by the fact that it defies reason. The fifth stanza makes this clear:

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Christianity is quite clearly in view here, since the Christian tradition often portrays Jesus as a lamb. The Tyger's primal power, its strength-as-beauty, does not accord with Christian virtues of humility and agape-love. This raises a logical contradiction: did the same God who made the lamb (and who became a lamb) also make the Tyger?

This contradiction is not meant to be solved or explained away. Rather, its very irrationality is the peak of the sublime encounter that "Man" undergoes when coming across the Tyger's powerful beauty/beautiful power. In this way, Blake is using this poem to point to the kind of spiritual and emotional experience that the Romantics sought, and which they believed that the Age of Enlightenment had managed to cut people off from.

William Blake was born and raised in the late neoclassical era of literature, painting, and architecture, which turned to ancient Greece and Rome for formal and thematic inspiration. In "The Tyger," the metaphor of the blacksmith creator in the fourth stanza with its “hammer” and “chain” and “furnace” references the Greco-Roman blacksmith god Hephaestus/Vulcan, patron of artisans and craftspeople, who was famously born disabled, or “lame,” by a misshapen foot. This image of fire and iron represents the mechanized factories spreading across England and reflects Blake's concern about the ways that unchecked industrial growth was affecting the the natural ecology of nature and humanity. The detail of the god's physical disability correlates with Blake's skepticism about the rhetoric of progress and divine favor that underpinned Western capitalism.

Figures like Blake and his contemporaries were exploring deep philosophical questions about the nature and potential of humanity, as well as the origins of good and evil, the co-existent forces of creativity and destructiveness. These were metaphysical matters, and, as an artist, Blake might not have been as interested in the new scientific understanding of nature as he was in expressing the sense of eternal mystery, dread, and awe that people had traditionally felt before God. These were similar questions to those that motivated the era’s great natural scientists, except that Blake wasn’t trying to produce facts. Instead, he was defining the artist’s role in the new ways of seeing and thinking that he was exposed to in the second half of the eighteenth century, the period commonly known as "the Enlightenment."

As William Blake was a supporter of the French Revolution, it’s not altogether surprising to discover that a number of critics, including his biographer Peter Ackroyd, have interpreted the tiger in his famous poem as a metaphor for revolution.

In the aftermath of the notorious September Massacres in 1792, a British statesman declared that one might as well think of establishing a republic of tigers in some forests of Africa, the implication being that the French revolutionaries were behaving like wild, ravenous beasts.

Years later, in his epic autobiographical poem The Prelude, William Wordsworth would describe the revolutionary Paris of his youth as “a place of fear...Defenceless as a wood where tigers roam.” In drawing a connection between tigers and revolutionaries, Blake was part of an established tradition, though unlike the Wordsworth who wrote The Prelude, he was very much in sympathy with the French Revolution.

The tiger as revolutionary is just one of many images of rebellion and revolution in the poem. There is an allusion to Prometheus, the Titan in classical mythology who stole fire from the gods and gave it to man: “On what wings dare he aspire / What the hand, dare seize the fire?” And in “The Tyger,” even the stars are in rebellion; they have thrown down their spears in what is a clear allusion to the fall of the angels in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

To quote a later poet, William Butler Yeats, Blake sees a “terrible beauty” in both the act of revolution and the tiger, this beautiful but deadly creature emerging stealthily from the dark forest of time.