Page 279 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes 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 watered 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?
Summary
The poem begins with the speaker asking a fearsome tiger what kind of divine being could have
created it: “What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame they fearful symmetry?” Each subsequent
stanza contains further questions, all of which refine this first one. From what part of the cosmos
could the tiger’s fiery eyes have come, and who would have dared to handle that fire? What sort of
physical presence, and what kind of dark craftsmanship, would have been required to “twist the
sinews” of the tiger’s heart? The speaker wonders how, once that horrible heart “began to beat,” its
creator would have had the courage to continue the job. Comparing the creator to a blacksmith, he
ponders about the anvil and the furnace that the project would have required and the smith who
could have wielded them. And when the job was done, the speaker wonders, how would the creator
have felt? “Did he smile his work to see?” Could this possibly be the same being who made the lamb?
Form

The poem is comprised of six quatrains in rhymed couplets. The meter is regular and rhythmic, its
hammering beat suggestive of the smithy that is the poem’s central image. The simplicity and neat
proportions of the poems form perfectly suit its regular structure, in which a string of questions all
contribute to the articulation of a single, central idea.

Commentary
The opening question enacts what will be the single dramatic gesture of the poem, and each subsequent
stanza elaborates on this conception. Blake is building on the conventional idea that nature, like a
work of art, must in some way contain a reflection of its creator. The tiger is strikingly beautiful yet
also horrific in its capacity for violence. What kind of a God, then, could or would design such a
terrifying beast as the tiger? In more general terms, what does the undeniable existence of evil and
violence in the world tell us about the nature of God, and what does it mean to live in a world where
a being can at once contain both beauty and horror?
The tiger initially appears as a strikingly sensuous image. However, as the poem progresses, it
takes on a symbolic character, and comes to embody the spiritual and moral problem the poem
explores: perfectly beautiful and yet perfectly destructive, Blake’s tiger becomes the symbolic center
for an investigation into the presence of evil in the world. Since the tiger’s remarkable nature exists

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