Page 280 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

Unit 26: William Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience

both in physical and moral terms, the speaker’s questions about its origin must also encompass Notes
both physical and moral dimensions. The poem’s series of questions repeatedly ask what sort of
physical creative capacity the “fearful symmetry” of the tiger bespeaks; assumedly only a very
strong and powerful being could be capable of such a creation.
The smithy represents a traditional image of artistic creation; here Blake applies it to the divine
creation of the natural world. The “forging” of the tiger suggests a very physical, laborious, and
deliberate kind of making; it emphasizes the awesome physical presence of the tiger and precludes
the idea that such a creation could have been in any way accidentally or haphazardly produced. It
also continues from the first description of the tiger the imagery of fire with its simultaneous
connotations of creation, purification, and destruction. The speaker stands in awe of the tiger as a
sheer physical and aesthetic achievement, even as he recoils in horror from the moral implications
of such a creation; for the poem addresses not only the question of who could make such a creature
as the tiger, but who would perform this act. This is a question of creative responsibility and of will,
and the poet carefully includes this moral question with the consideration of physical power. Note,
in the third stanza, the parallelism of “shoulder” and “art,” as well as the fact that it is not just the
body but also the “heart” of the tiger that is being forged. The repeated use of word the “dare” to
replace the “could” of the first stanza introduces a dimension of aspiration and willfulness into the
sheer might of the creative act.
The reference to the lamb in the penultimate stanza reminds the reader that a tiger and a lamb have
been created by the same God, and raises questions about the implications of this. It also invites a
contrast between the perspectives of “experience” and “innocence” represented here and in the
poem “The Lamb.” “The Tyger” consists entirely of unanswered questions, and the poet leaves us
to awe at the complexity of creation, the sheer magnitude of God’s power, and the inscrutability of
divine will. The perspective of experience in this poem involves a sophisticated acknowledgment
of what is unexplainable in the universe, presenting evil as the prime example of something that
cannot be denied, but will not withstand facile explanation, either. The open awe of “The Tyger”
contrasts with the easy confidence, in “The Lamb,” of a child’s innocent faith in a benevolent universe.

Analysis

The Tyger belongs to Songs of Experience which was written by William Blake. The Romantic poet
published his collection of poems himself in London, in 1794. The poet came up with a technique
called ‘relief etching’ to be able to add his illustrations.
The poem contains six quatrains; and its rhyme is assonant, and follows perfectly the pattern aabb
due to, in the case of the first and the sixth stanzas, the word ‘symmetry’ is pronounced in such a
way that it rhymes with ‘eye.
With regard to the semantic fields, there are words related to the tools used by an ironsmith like, for
instance, ‘hammer’, ‘chain’, ‘furnace’, and ‘anvil’, in the fourth stanza. Also, we can find a semantic
field related to Nature like, for example, ‘forests’ (line 2), ‘skies’ (line 5), ‘Tyger’ (lines 1 and 21), and
‘Lamb’ (line 20). But, above all, the poet used a semantic field related to Creation when he writes
words or phases like:

‘What immortal hand and eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?’

The simple structure and the vocabulary help the reader to understand the main
topics or concepts, which are Evil, Good, and God.
The first impression that William Blake gives is that he sees a terrible tiger in the night, and, as a
result of his state of panic, the poet exaggerates the description of the animal when he writes:

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