The Tyger

William Blake - 1757-1827

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 sieze 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?

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 Poem "The Tyger" by William Blake

"The Tyger" is one of William Blake's most popular poems, from the book Songs of Innocence
and Experience.  This was a single book of two parts, the first completed in 1789, the second
from 1794 when the whole was published.

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 Blake illustrated the book with his inventive and curiously imaginative etchings, and "The
Tyger" has its own visual representation: a tiger walking past a stylistic, leafless tree.

The model for Blake's tiger could well have been a live one: a well-stocked menagerie based in a
large house on London's Strand (Exeter Exchange) was a winter stopover for animals belonging
to a traveling circus. It was well active during Blake's lifetime.

But the theme of Blake's book was an exploration of "the two contrary states of the human soul,"
with one eye on the plight of children within society, and the other on the lack of spiritual vision
in the state and religion as a whole.

What makes the poems so unique is their nursery rhyme appearance—full rhyme and appealing
rhythms—holding such a wealth of meaning. Blake gave us superb lyric, but combined
symbolism and metaphor within which adds a cutting edge.

Blake was no mean singer of songs when visiting friends (it was a popular thing to do at the
time), and the title of his book perhaps was to encourage readers (including children) to sing the
poems as you would a lyric. As two lines in the first poem "Introduction" state:

And I wrote my happy songs

Every child may joy to hear.

Many of the poems are conventional in form—rhyming, rhythmical short lines—reflecting the
common poetry and ballads of late 18th century England. Yet, Blake incorporates symbolism,
societal trends and psychic states into some of his poems, which was a different way of
approaching subjects.

There are allusions to Milton (Paradise Lost), mythology and the Bible too, which when thrown
into the mix with nature, anatomy, industry and many questions that don't receive a ready
answer, can result in ambiguous vision.

But there's no getting away from the desire for radical change, the presence of the divine and
compassionate observation and sensitivity.

 There is no doubt that the tiger in the poem is a metaphor for certain aspects of human
nature, namely the more revolutionary, fiery, destructive, irresistible and dangerous traits often
displayed, individually and collectively, by homo sapiens.
 "The Tyger" is the counterpart to Blake's poem "The Lamb," found in the first part of his
book, Songs of Innocence. In this poem, two part, question and answer, the lamb represents
Christ as the lamb of God—gentle, peace-loving and made by "meek and mild" Christ.

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 In "The Tyger" poem the question is asked: Did he who made the Lamb make thee? But
there is no definitive answer.
 The stanzas, quatrains, are made up of rhyming couplets. The metre (meter in American
English) is mostly trochaic. A detailed analysis of syllable and stress can be found later on in this
article.
Throughout his creative adult life, Blake sought to contrast the human spirit and secular life. God
and the divine spirit were for him the sublime, and his visions resulted from this desire for an
ideal world to eventually emerge out of the grotesque, human history. Never an orthodox
Christian, he followed the Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, who created the New
Church and wrote on the afterlife.

Mystic, visionary, poet and engraver Blake believed in divine revelation right to the end; near
death he ‘burst out in Singing of the things he Saw in Heaven'.

"The Tyger" and "The French Revolution"

Some modern writers parallel Blake's "The Tyger" with events that happened in France during
the French revolution, 1789-99.

"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'"

This may be partially true. In fact Blake had written a more politically direct poem titled
"The French Revolution," and published the first part in 1790. Strangely, it was
supposed to be a seven part poem of some length but the rest never materialized.

Blake and his publishers either got cold feet—Blake's political views were basically anti-
royal and pro-democracy, quite a dangerous stance to take back in their day - or put the
project on hold for obvious reasons.

Perhaps the turning point came when the French royal family were caught escaping in
the summer of 1791 and sent back to Paris for trial. The beginning of the end. England
looked on with a mix of horror and trepidation. Luckily for Blake (and the royal family)
such radical events and political upheaval never crossed the channel.

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 Major Themes in “The Tyger”: 

Wonder and good versus evil are the major themes in the poem. The
writer has used visual imagery coupled with other literary elements to
incorporate these themes in the text. Throughout the poem, the speaker
shows a sense of awe and wonder about the creation of the tiger. While
observing the astounding symmetry of the tiger, he fails to understand
how the same God who created the gentle lamb could also make the
vicious Tiger. However, the poem reflects that humans cannot
understand the supremacy of God’s and his work.