- The Poem
- Notes on Context
- Notes on Form
- Notes on Content
- Commentary and Quotations
“The Tyger” addresses its subject directly, the poet calling on the creature by name -- “Tyger! Tyger!” -- and asking a series of rhetorical questions that are all variations on the first question -- What being could have made you? What kind of God created this fearsome and yet beautiful creature? Was he pleased with his handiwork? Was he the same being who created the sweet little lamb?
The first stanza of the poem creates an intensely visual image of the tyger “burning bright / In the forests of the night,” matched by Blake’s hand-colored engraving in which the tyger positively glows, radiating sinewy, dangerous life at the bottom of the page whose dark sky at the top is background for these very words. The poet is awed by the tyger’s “fearful symmetry” and marvels at “the fire of thine eyes,” the art that “Could twist the sinews of thy heart,” the creator who both could and would dare to make such a powerfully beautiful and dangerously violent creature.
In the last line of the second stanza, Blake hints that he sees this creator as a blacksmith, asking “What the hand dare seize the fire?” By the fourth stanza, this metaphor comes vividly to life, reinforced by the pounding trochees: “What the hammer? what the chain? / In what furnace was thy brain? / What the anvil?” The tyger is born in fire and violence, and may be said to represent the tumult and maddening power of the industrial world. Some readers see the tyger as an emblem of evil and darkness, some critics have interpreted the poem as an allegory of the French Revolution, others believe Blake is describing the artist’s creative process, and others trace the symbols in the poem to Blake’s own special Gnostic mysticism -- interpretations abound.
What is certain is that “The Tyger,” being one of his Songs of Experience, represents one of two “contrary states of the human soul” -- “experience” perhaps in the sense of disillusionment being contrary to “innocence” or the naivete of a child. In the penultimate stanza, Blake brings the tyger round to face his counterpart in Songs of Innocence, “The Lamb,” asking “Did he smile his work to see? / Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” The tyger is fierce, frightening and wild, yet part of the same creation as the lamb, docile and endearing. In the final stanza, Blake repeats the original burning question, creating a more powerful awe by substituting the word “dare” for “could”:
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
