‘Did he who made the lamb make thee?’ Appearing in, ‘The Tyger’ is usually understood as the companion piece of ‘The Lamb’ in; both poems ask the same question: where do we come from? In ‘The Lamb’, an answer is given: God made us – a simple affirmation of faith. ‘The Tyger’ only implies the answer by posing the rhetorical question: ‘Did he who made the lamb make thee?’ Indeed, one of the most noticeable features of ‘The Tyger’ is that it takes the form of a series of questions, none of which are answered. Whereas ‘The Lamb’ posits the process of creation as natural and harmonious, ‘The Tyger’ shows us something much more violent and mysterious; the tiger comes from ‘the forests of the night’ and its eyes burn in ‘distant deeps and skies’. Its creation is an act of confrontation and audacity. The poem shifts between ‘could’ (ability) and ‘dare’ (which implies transgression and disobedience), ending in ‘dare’ in the final stanza, a direct repeat of the first except for the change of verb at the start of the final line, which is marked with a spondee (‘Dare frame’) rather than the iamb of the first stanza (‘Could frame’), emphasizing its significance.
Images of rebellion and revolution The poem is full of references to rebellion: to Satan’s revolt in Paradise Lost (‘the stars threw down their spears’), to Prometheus, a favourite rebel of the Romantics (‘What the hand dare seize the fire?’), and, perhaps to Icarus (‘On what wings dare he aspire?’ – though this line might just as easily evoke Milton’s Satan). Such images have led some critics to see the tiger as a metaphor for revolution. As Peter Ackroyd suggests, ‘Even as Blake worked upon the poem the revolutionaries in France were being branded in the image of a ravening beast – after the Paris massacres of September 1792, an English statesman declared, “One might as well think of establishing a republic of tigers in some forests in Africa”, and there were newspaper references to “the tribunal of tigers”.
At a later date Marat’s eyes were said to resemble “those of the tyger cat’”. In The Prelude, Wordsworth describes post-revolutionary Paris as ‘a place of fear Defenceless as a wood where tigers roam’. The tiger, powerful, unpredictable, gorgeous but deadly, becomes a potent image for what W B Yeats would later call the ‘terrible beauty’ of revolution. Images of industry Another complex aspect of Blake’s metaphor is that, unlike the lamb, who is ‘made’ by God, the tiger owes its existence to a combination of human labour and industrial process. Stanza three focuses on human effort, the shoulder and the art which ‘twist the sinews of thy heart’.
Stanza four conceives of the tiger’s creation in terms of industry, using a series of metonyms for the blacksmith’s forge: ‘hammer’, ‘chain’, ‘furnace’, ‘anvil’. While, like all the Romantics, Blake was repelled by the Industrial Revolution and its objectification of human beings, this stanza has undeniable energy and a fascination with what industry can produce: ‘what dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp?’ It’s interesting that both the worker and the tiger are represented by a strange combination of body parts (‘shoulder’, ‘heart’, ‘sinews’, ‘hand’, ‘feet’, ‘brain’). A parallel can perhaps be drawn with the creature constructed in a ‘workshop of filthy creation’ in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, another text which draws upon both Paradise Lost and the Prometheus myth, asking questions about who makes us, and deploring industrialisation. Uncertainty and ambiguity Where ‘The Lamb’ offers the reader simple certainties and the loving, benign God of the New Testament, ‘The Tyger’ presents creation as enigmatic and unknowable.
Some critics see this as indicative of the painful, fallen world of experience where faith is impossible, ‘the distant deeps’ offering only insecurity and epistemological chaos. ‘The Tyger’ thus becomes part of the Experience poems’ pessimism and anguish. But perhaps there is another way of understanding the refusal to offer straightforward answers. As Heather Glen suggests, Blake’s ambiguity is part of a broader challenge to 18th-century readers, who would have been familiar with the fashionable instructive literature of the time – literature that provided clear, didactic, moral concepts. ‘The contemporary reader’, writes Glen, ‘might well have been disturbed by the view of life implied by the Songs; but more fundamentally – though perhaps less consciously – disturbing is the fact that there seems to be no obvious argument propounded in them at all’.
The radical nature of Blake’s poetry, Glen suggests, is due to its ambiguity and its lack of clear moral explanation. For Blake, the imagination is the ultimate creative force: ‘What is now proved was once only imagined,’ he wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. His complex and enigmatic metaphor creates a space where imaginative energies can be released. Ever the enemy of narrow, earth-bound materialism, Blake reveals ‘the forests of the night’ as a place where we may dare to aspire and unleash the ‘fearful symmetry’ of the imagination.
Study Guide Prepared by By Michael J. © 2003 Type of Work and Year of Publication 'The Tiger,' originally called ',' is a focusing on the nature of God and his creations.
The Tyger William Blake Symbolism
It was published in 1794 in a collection entitled Songs of Experience. Modern anthologies often print 'The Tiger' alongside an earlier Blake poem, 'The Lamb,' published in 1789 in a collection entitled Songs of Innocence. Meter The poem is in trochaic tetrameter with catalexis at the end of each line. Here is an explanation of these technical terms: Tetrameter Line: a poetry line usually with eight syllables. Trochaic Foot: A pair of syllables-a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. Catalexis: The absence of a syllable in the final foot in a line.
In Blake’s poem, an unstressed syllable is absent in the last foot of each line. Thus, every line has seven syllables, not the conventional eight. The following illustration using the first two lines of the poem demonstrates tetrameter with four trochaic feet, the last one catalectic. NIGHT Notice that the fourth foot in each line eliminates the conventional unstressed syllable (catalexis). However, this irregularity in the trochaic pattern does not harm the rhythm of the poem. In fact, it may actually enhance it, allowing each line to end with an accented syllable that seems to mimic the beat of the maker’s hammer on the anvil.
For a detailed discussion of meter and the various types of feet,. Structure and Rhyme Scheme The poem consists of six quatrains. (A quatrain is a four-line stanza.) Each quatrain contains two couplets. (A couplet is a pair of rhyming lines). Thus we have a twenty-four-line poem with twelve couplets and six stanzas–a neat, balanced package. The question in the final stanza repeats (except for one word, dare) the wording of the first stanza, perhaps suggesting that the question Blake raises will continue to perplex thinkers ad infinitum. Examples Figures of Speech and Allusions Alliteration: Tiger, tiger, burning bright (line 1); f rame thy f ear f ul symmetry?
(line 4) Metaphor: Comparison of the tiger and his eyes to fire. Anaphora: Repetition of what at the beginning of sentences or clauses. Example: What dread hand and what dread feet? / What the hammer? What the chain? Allusion: Immortal hand or eye: God or Satan Allusion: Distant deeps or skies: hell or heaven.
Symbols The Tiger: Evil (or Satan) The Lamb: Goodness (or God) Distant Deeps: Hell Skies: Heaven Themes The Existence of Evil “The Tiger” presents a question that embodies the central theme: Who created the tiger? Was it the kind and loving God who made the lamb? Or was it Satan? Blake presents his question in lines 3 and 4: What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? Blake realizes, of course, that God made all the creatures on earth. However, to express his bewilderment that the God who created the gentle lamb also created the terrifying tiger, he includes Satan as a possible creator while raising his rhetorical questions, notably the one he asks in lines 5 and 6: In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thy eyes?
Deeps appears to refer to hell and skies to heaven. In either case, there would be fire-the fire of hell or the fire of the stars. Of course, there can be no gainsaying that the tiger symbolizes evil, or the incarnation of evil, and that the lamb (Line 20) represents goodness, or Christ. Blake's inquiry is a variation on an old philosophical and theological question: Why does evil exist in a universe created and ruled by a benevolent God?
Blake provides no answer. His mission is to reflect reality in arresting images. A poet’s first purpose, after all, is to present the world and its denizens in language that stimulates the aesthetic sense; he is not to exhort or moralize. Nevertheless, the poem does stir the reader to deep thought.
Here is the tiger, fierce and brutal in its quest for sustenance; there is the lamb, meek and gentle in its quest for survival. Is it possible that the same God who made the lamb also made the tiger? Or was the tiger the devil's work? The Awe and Mystery of Creation and the Creator The poem is more about the creator of the tiger than it is about the tiger intself.
In contemplating the terrible ferocity and awesome symmetry of the tiger, the speaker is at a loss to explain how the same God who made the lamb could make the tiger. Hence, this theme: humans are incapable of fully understanding the mind of God and the mystery of his handiwork.
The Tiger By William Blake 1 Tiger, tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? Stanza 1 Summary What immortal being created this terrifying creature which, with its perfect proportions ( symmetry), is an awesome killing machine? 2 In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire? Stanza 2 Summary Was it created in hell ( distant deeps) or in heaven ( skies)?
If the creator had wings, how could he get so close to the fire in which the tiger was created? How could he work with so blazing a fire? 3 And what shoulder and what art Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand and what dread feet? Stanza 3 Summary What strength ( shoulder) and craftsmanship ( art) could make the tiger's heart? What being could then stand before it ( feet) and shape it further ( hand)?
4 What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil?
What dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp? Stanza 4 Summary What kind of tool ( hammer) did he use to fashion the tiger in the forge fire? What about the chain connected to the pedal which the maker used to pump the bellows? What of the heat in the furnace and the anvil on which the maker hammered out his creation?
How did the maker muster the courage to grasp the tiger? 5 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? Stanza 5 Summary When the stars cast their light on the new being and the clouds cried, was the maker pleased with his creation?
6 Tiger, tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? Stanza 6 Summary The poet repeats the the central question of the poem, stated in Stanza 1. However, he changes could (line 4) to dare (line 24). This is a significant change, for the poet is no longer asking who had the capability of creating the tiger but who dared to create so frightful a creature.
Summary In this counterpart poem to “The Lamb” in Songs of Innocence, Blake offers another view of God through His creation. Whereas the lamb implied God’s tenderness and mercy, the tiger suggests His ferocity and power. The speaker again asks questions of the subject: “What immortal hand or eye/Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” The questions continue throughout the poem, with the answers implied in the final question that is not a repetition of an earlier question: “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” The same God who made the gentle, obedient lamb also made the frightening, powerful, and bloody-minded tiger, and whereas the lamb was simply “made,” the tiger is forged: “What the hammer? What the chain?/ In what furnace was thy brain?” Analysis The use of smithing imagery for the creation of the tiger hearkens to Blake’s own oft-written contrast between the natural world and the industrialism of the London of his day. While the creator is still God, the means of creation for so dangerous a creature is mechanical rather than natural. Technology may be a benefit to mankind in many ways, but within it still holds deadly potential. In form and content, 'The Tyger' also parallels the Biblical book of Job.
Job, too, was confronted by the sheer awe and power of God, who asks the suffering man a similar series of rhetorical questions designed to lead Job not to an answer, but to an understanding of the limitations inherent in human wisdom. This limitation is forced into view by the final paradox: 'Did he who made the Lamb make thee?' Can the God of Innocence also be the God of Experience? If so, how can mere mortals, trapped in one state or the other, ever hope to understand this God? 'The Tyger' follows an AABB rhyme scheme throughout, but with the somewhat problematic first and last stanzas rhyming 'eye' with 'symmetry.'
This jarring near rhyme puts the reader in an uneasy spot from the beginning and returns him to it at the end, thus foreshadowing and concluding the experience of reading 'The Tyger' as one of discomfort. How To Cite in MLA Format Gordon, Todd. Wang, Bella ed. 'Songs of Innocence and of Experience “The Tyger” Summary and Analysis'. GradeSaver, 31 May 2011 Web.
‘What immortal hand or eye Could frame they fearful symmetry?' Each subsequent stanza contains further questions, developing from this first one:. In what kind of world could such a creature exist?.
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What kind of creator could produce such a creature?. What kind of power and skill would have been required to ‘twist the sinews' of the tiger's heart?. What kind of creator would have had the courage and the daring to continue the work of creating such ferocity?. Comparing the creator to a blacksmith, he wonders what kind of hammer, anvil and furnace would be necessary and what kind of blacksmith could have used such tools?.
Did creating this ferocious beast give pleasure to its creator?. Could this possibly be the same divine being who made the lamb? This is a companion poem to The Lamb in Songs of Innocence. The poem invites us to consider the mind which produces questions about the nature of the world and its creator. It also challenges the reader to accept that the dangerous and potentially destructive forces in the world are also attractive and beautiful. Commentary This is a poem which can be read in two ways.
If we read it apart from knowledge of Blake's beliefs, it yields one meaning. If we read it using that knowledge, we find another. First possible reading The tiger is strikingly beautiful yet also horrific in its power, energy and - through its association with fire - capacity for destructiveness.
It's clear that the tiger is symbolic. ‘The forests of the night' suggests places of darkness where it is easy to get lost, where wild beasts lurk.
It seems, then, to be an energy inhabiting the dark and destructive aspects of human nature and experience. The associations with ‘distant deeps or skies' suggests that this power resides not only in humans but in the whole of creation. Thus, the tiger is an embodiment of the fierce energy present in the cosmos. The associations of the tiger's creator with the fall of the (‘When the stars threw down their spears') and the establishment of, would seem to suggest that the tiger is a, evil force.
This is developed by the emphasis upon its terrible aspects in 3 and 4 with the repetition of ‘dread' and ‘deadly terrors'. The main focus, however, is not on the identity of the tiger but of the tiger's creator. What kind of a could or would design such a terrifying beast as the tiger? The verb ‘frame' suggests that the maker can both build and encompass or restrict this mighty animal.
If the tiger is so terrible, how much more terrible must its creator be? This beast is the product not only of ferocious, immense power – ‘hand', ‘shoulder', ‘hammer', ‘chain', ‘furnace', ‘anvil'. It is also the product of a creating mind – an ‘eye', an ‘art'. Does he ‘smile his work to see' because he takes pleasure in violence and evil? Is it, therefore, a malicious smile?
Or is the smile because the tiger's ferocity is also attractive and beautiful? What kind of God could envisage and create both the beautiful, sensuous ferocity of the tiger and the beautiful, meek tenderness of the Lamb? This reading suggests that Blake's concern here is with the perennial problem of evil and the existence of a good God.
How can a good God allow or produce what is evil? How can evil exist in a world created by a good God? The second possible reading This acknowledges the same reflections on the presentation of the tiger, but it starts from a question arising from knowledge of Blake's beliefs. Blake did not believe in an external God, a ruler / creator apart from humanity.
If this is so, who is the creator here? According to Blake, the creator is a creation of the mind of the speaker, which can only operate from the perspective of Experience:. It is the mind which produces the God which Blake rejects in To Nobodaddy. It creates the division between the lamb and the tiger, seeing them as incompatible, labelling meekness and vulnerability ‘good' and power, will, force ‘bad'. It sees the world as a battle between a ‘good' God, creator of the Lamb and an ‘evil' force of angels associated with the dynamism of the tiger. Yet the tiger is only a moral problem for those who are limited by such a perspective. The creator of the tiger is the product of the ‘mind fetters' which enchain the human being.
In this reading, therefore, the poem is primarily about the attitude of the narrator, rather than the apparent subject matter.
WE CAN HELP YOU With Your Research Paper “The Tyger” is a poem taken from William Blake’s Songs of Experience. The poem is organized in the form of a series of rhetorical questions regarding the main character, the tiger, itself.
Here, the poet is equally amazed and intimidated by the presence of the creature, which he constantly compares to the domestic lamb. The Tyger BY WILLIAM BLAKE Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies. Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire? And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet? What the hammer?
What the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors clasp! WE CAN HELP YOU With Your Research Paper 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? Tyger Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? Analysis of Blake’s “The Tyger” The entire poem has been arranged in the manner of a string of questions, all striving to justify the wonderment of the speaker, who is perplexed at such a creation as the tiger who is able to bring out in people both admiration and fear at the same time. William Blake is lenient with the use of visuals as a literary device in order to put emphasis on the tiger’s fiery essence. Indeed the first line of the poem serves as an ideal example, “ Tyger Tyger, burning bright,” Although initially the speaker is more concerned about the physical presence of the tiger, by the third and fourth stanza, the poem has progressed to the creator itself, rather than the creation. Who could have made such a creation and moreover, who would perform such an act?
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The poem now discusses the moral implications of giving life to such a creature, which admittedly sensuous, has the ability to bring about massive destruction if let loose. A comparison made constantly throughout the whole plot is the tiger’s to that of the lamb from another one of Blake’s poems from his collection, Songs of Innocence.
While the latter is a sweet docile animal and symbolizes the naivety of a child who has yet not been polluted by the ill thoughts of this world, the tiger is a refection of the uncased passion that lies within all of us, a passion that can either bring an end to us or be the life of us. Here, William Blake attempts to make us realize that while we may require qualities like loyalty and humility in our lives to keep us more settled to the earth, we also need the fire of our unbridled passion to free ourselves from the falsities of life.
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