Page 103 - DENG101_Communication Skills-I

Communication Skills-I

Notes Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Explanation: Here the author, with beautiful rhetoric, describes a marvelous creation process
likening starlight to a symbolic destructive process. The author wonders whether the creator of
the fierce and predatory tiger could also make the docile, gentle lamb. He sees a confl ict between

the creation of heartless, burning predator and its potential victim, the lamb.
Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Explanation: The final verse is but a reprise, almost a chorus. It serves the purpose of repeating
the wondrous question of the tiger’s creation and gives the reader another chance to enjoy the
rhetorical and already answered question, “What immortal hand or eye?”
The answer lies in the reader’s interpretation of creation: Did God create the fearsome along with
the gentle? Why does He allow the tiger to burn in the dark forest, while the lamb gambols in
the glen under the stars of that very creation? The author leaves it up to the reader to decide. The
important thing is the question, not the answer.

9.2.1 About the Poet

William Blake was born in London in 1757, one of six children of a hosiery merchant. He talked

of visionary experiences from a very early age: at 10, he saw a tree filled with angels when he
was wandering the countryside just outside town. He later claimed to have read Milton as a child
and he began writing “Poetical Sketches” at 13. He was also interested in painting and drawing
in childhood, but his parents could not afford art school, so he was apprenticed to an engraver
at the age of 14.
The first collection of poems William Blake published was Poetical Sketches in 1783 — clearly

the work of a young apprentice poet, with its odes to the four seasons, an imitation of Spenser,
historical prologues and songs. His most loved collections were next, the paired Songs of Innocence
(1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), both published as handmade illuminated books. After the
upheaval of the French Revolution his work became more political and allegorical, protesting and
satirizing war and tyranny in books like America, a Prophecy (1793), Visions of the Daughters of
Albion (1793) and Europe, a Prophecy (1794).

9.2.2 Summary and Analysis of the Poem

Published in 1794 as one of the Songs of Experience, Blake’s “The Tyger” is a poem about
the nature of creation, much as is his earlier poem from the Songs of Innocence, “The Lamb.”
However, this poem takes on the darker side of creation, when its benefits are less obvious than

simple joys. Blake’s simplicity in language and construction contradicts the complexity of his
ideas. This poem is meant to be interpreted in comparison and contrast to “The Lamb,” showing
the “two contrary states of the human soul” with respect to creation. It has been said many times
that Blake believed that a person had to pass through an innocent state of being, like that of the
lamb, and also absorb the contrasting conditions of experience, like those of the tiger, in order to
reach a higher level of consciousness. In any case, Blake’s vision of a creative force in the universe
making a balance of innocence and experience is at the heart of this poem. The poem’s speaker is
never defined, and so may be more closely aligned with Blake himself than in his other poems.

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