The Tyger
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 seize the fire?
And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? And 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?
Commentary
… dunno what happened to Sunday’s poem. Martin?
Another famous poem which is no less wonderful for being popular… this is one of the earliest poems I remember being entranced by, and to this day the magic remains as powerful as it was the first time round.
Overview
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. One interpretation could be that it is the Bard from the Introduction to the Songs of Experience walking through the ancient forest and encountering the beast within himself, or within the material world. The poem reflects primarily the speaker’s response to the tiger, rather than the tiger’s response to the world.It important to remember that Blake lived in a time that had never heard of popular psychology as we understand it today. He wrote the mass of his work before the Romantic movement in English literature. He lived in a world that was in the opening stages of the Industrial Revolution, and in the midst of political revolutions all over Europe and in America. As we look at his work we must in some way forget many of the ideas about creativity, artists, and human nature that we take for granted today, and reimagine them for the first time as, perhaps, Blake did himself. It is in this way that Blake’s poetry has the power to astound us with his insight.
Construction
“The Tyger” contains six four-line stanzas, and uses pairs of rhyming couplets to create a sense of rhythm and continuity. The notable exception occurs in lines 3 and 4 and 23 and 24, where “eye” is imperfectly paired, ironically enough, with “symmetry.”The majority of lines in this lyric contain exactly seven syllables, alternating between stressed and unstressed syllables:
Tyger! / Tyger! / burning / bright . . .
This pattern has sometimes been identified as trochaic tetrameter — four (“tetra”) sets of trochees, or pairs of stressed and unstressed syllables — even though the final trochee lacks the unstressed syllable. There are several exceptions to this rhythm, most notably lines 4, 20, and 24, which are eight-syllable lines of iambic tetrameter, or four pairs of syllables that follow the pattern unstress/stress, called an iamb. This addition of an unstressed syllable at the beginning of each of these lines gives them extra emphasis.
Criticism
“The Tyger” has long been recognized as one of Blake’s finest poems; in his 1863 Life of William Blake, biographer Alexander Gilchrist relates that the poem “happens to have been quoted often enough … to have made its strange old Hebrew-like grandeur, its Oriental latitude yet force of eloquence, comparatively familiar” and that essayist and critic Charles Lamb wrote of Blake: “I have heard of his poems, but have never seen them. There is one to a tiger … which is glorious!” In his 1906 work William Blake: A Critical Essay, British poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne similarly calls the lyric “a poem beyond praise for its fervent beauty and vigour of music.”Many critics have focused on the symbolism in “The Tyger,” frequently contrasting it with the language, images, and questions of origin presented by its “innocent” counterpart, “The Lamb.” E. D. Hirsch, Jr., for instance, notes that while “The Tyger” satirizes the lyrics found in “The Lamb” that is not the poem’s primary function. As the critic asserts in his Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake, in combining tones of terror and awe at a being that could create the tiger as well as the lamb, the poet “celebrates the divinity and beauty of the creation and its transcendance of human good and evil without relinquishing the Keatsian awareness that ‘the miseries of the world Are misery.’” Hazard Adams believes that the poem demonstrates that “creation in art is for Blake the renewal of visionary truth.” He explains in his 1963 study William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems that while the tiger may be terrifying, it presents an intensity of vision that should be welcomed with “a gaiety which can find a place in the divine plan for both the tears and spears of the stars, … and for both the tiger and the lamb.”While ‘The Tyger’ can be read in a variety of ways, Mark Schorer asserts in William Blake: The Politics of Vision that “the juxtaposition of lamb and tiger points not merely to the opposition of innocence and experience, but to the resolution of the paradox they present.” As the lamb is subjected to the travails of the world, “innocence is converted to exprience. It does not rest there. Energy can be curbed but it cannot be destroyed, and when it reaches the limits of its endurance, it bursts forth in revolutionary wrath.” Jerome J. McGann, however, asserts in a 1973 essay that the poem defies specific interpretation: “As with so many of Blake’s lyrics, part of the poem’s strategy is to resist attempts to imprint meaning upon it. “The Tyger” tempts us to a cognitive apprehension but in the end exhausts our efforts.” As a result, the critic concludes, “the extreme diversity of opinion among critics of Blake about the meaning of particular poems and passages of poems is perhaps the most eloquent testimony we have to the success of his work.”
For a very detailed, line-by-line analysis of the poem, do visit
http://www.gale.com/gale/poetry/tyger.html
— Thomas
Show 26 commentsHide comments
From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Abraham Thomas · 17 February 2000
Sorry, but the link mentioned above doesn’t work any more. t.
BARCELOS ANDREW · 17 February 2000
i have a question.
the link @ the bottom of your page of “The Tiger” for a detailed line by line analysis of the poem. WHY DOESN’T IT WORK!!!!!!!!! i need help on that poem
i don’t understand it at all
plz help me
thank you
MUSATAFak · 8 September 2001
hii
i need the analysis of the poem cause i dont understand it at all i have a test coming up and the site with the analysis doesnt work plzzzzzzz do something.
Isabelle · 9 June 2002
hi, i’ve been studying Blake for my lit A-levels, a closed book exam on both this and ‘the Duchess of Malfi’. I think the problem that many of you are having with this poem is the attempt to understand it, if you analyse it completely it will loose its magic. Many literary ctritics far greater than myself have analysed this line-by-line and they have not come up with a uniform meaning. One of the most important things to stress is the semantic field of industry: ‘hammer’, ‘chain’ and ‘anvil’. The industrial revolution had just happened in Britain at the time of Blake’s writing and you can see through his nature imagery ,typical of the Romantic poets, in The Songs of Innocence that it is the countyside and nature which he favours, not the industrial nature of the city. ‘London’ is further proof of his favour towards the countryside. The Tyger is also both cruel and awe-inspiring for humans, it is this duplicity that makes the poem so ambiguous but don’t over analyse it.
all the best
SARAH
Gary Sawyer · 1 July 2002
Chaz Parker (amateur and aspiring poet)
“The Tyger,” a beautiful poem. Well-versed and has great symbolism and meaning! -chaz
PocaPsyko · 12 December 2002
thanks for your help from a French student who didn’t understand anything of this poem…
Beth Gourley · 15 January 2003
You will also want to visit the William Blake website. The various illuminated texts heighten the enjoyment of the text. [broken link] http://www.blakearchive.org/cgi-bin/nph-dweb/blake/Illuminated-Book/SONGSIE/songsie.c/@Generic__BookTextView/11007;cv=java#X –bag
Dorota Laner · 17 February 2003
for cat lovers here goes another poem,
:-)
Rainer Maria Rilke
The Panther
His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world. As he paces in cramped circles, over and over, the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles, plunges into the heart and is gone.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Der Panther
Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehn der Stäbe
so müd geworden, daß er nichts mehr hält.
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe
und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt.
Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte, der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht,
ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte,
in der betäubt ein großer Wille steht.
Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille
sich lautlos auf -. Dann geht ein Bild hinein, geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille -
und hört im Herzen auf zu sein.
Gerald Knight · 17 February 2003
The Tempest
Transposing the earth from mundane to sublime,
The lightning corrodes the night sky.
This virtual stranger, this perfect bolt,
Lashing the air like a knife.
Fragments of black
Sparky, Sporadic.
A fanatical gleam of sienna.
The fathomless sea darkens and swells,
Exulting, unearthly, electric.
The mountains grow purple in the dimming light
Ice-blue streaks and violet fire.
A slither of a moon
A technicolor ghost.
An affinity with the storm
A dissonance of noise and chaos;
Chasing clouds, wild dreams.
The origin of the magic -
Ancient, unknowable.
Illuminating a silver forest
The tumultuous embrace;
An oracle
Bewitching,
Opalescent,
Blazing and deep.
Ultimate Euphoria
Rachel Knight
anyone got any comments on this ? i just finished writing it and need some input !!
Bradley Bristow-Stagg · 14 May 2003
Rachel,
I really enjoyed your poem. Very nice descriptives captured the storm for my minds eye. I don’t know if this forum is still going but I would love to read more. A poet myself I submit one of my favs
Dream Sending
Last night did you send to me
A dream of wings, clouds and flying?
I lay upon my bed
And felt your presence descend
Then did I rise unto the very sky.
To soar and float
Among the great wide blue and clouded white
“Are you sending me this dream?
I see you there with your feathered wings.
Regal and sublime.”
With gentle smile and knowing release
You sent me soaring to lofty heights
When fall I back gently, on cushions cloudy soft Landing in your arms, a sweet feeling of peace.
Regards
Bradley
“Do not be content with showing friendship in words alone; let your heart burn with loving-kindness for all who may cross your path” –The Baha’i Faith > www.bahai.org
Annmaree Mavis-Jean Kernick · 22 May 2003
Just wondering, what would be the Poetic Devices used in this poem? Regards, Annmaree
James Marshall · 17 August 2003
Dear friend,
Read pp.338-340 of Robert Pirsig’s “Lila.” Especially the last two paragraphs of 340.
I think you will find it rewarding.
Have an uplifting day,
Jim
Hppyguy31 · 6 October 2004
The poem lends itself to diferent aspects in life, contemporarily, and in different arenas, socially and culturally.
Mary Vanderwerken · 18 November 2004
I believe the important point is both he lamb and tiger where able to survive. the terrible tiger had no ability to change the course of evolution. the simple virus has more power than a beast. whatever the plan divine or chance it has yet to unfold.
Y Zhang · 11 January 2005
It’s tiger not ‘tyger’ staff please edit all of this. Thank You
Anonymous
Y Zhang · 11 January 2005
This is another of my unsigned emails. In Danny Phantom in Nickelodeon this is the poem that Danny asks Mr. Blake I think why David Blake rhymes eye and symmetry thank you again all.
Anonymous
Y Zhang · 11 January 2005
This isn’t a cat poem at all dorota I am the same one who wrote comment at the bottom who didn’t sign so don’t think it’s a cat poem ‘cause it isn’t at all people should know I sign…….
Anonymous
Y Zhang · 11 January 2005
I know how this poem means it is a story about man’s bad side and how if the creator would appriciate this kind on behavior or crime and bad people. I don’t want to sign my name or email at all.
24041 · 25 April 2005
I want to know how william blake knew about the tigers in those days
Morgan · 6 September 2005
Why does he rhyme semitry witheye?
TheCureRockGirl · 27 September 2005
This poem. will lose its magic if we keep analyzing it to death. The meaning of the poem should come from your personal interpretation.
-Alex
Patrick Nguyen · 15 November 2005
actually its THE TYGER
Haroon Bhayat · 15 January 2006
hi i absolutely luv dis poem.
hawa
Shekhar Raj · 23 April 2007
the poem has a much better interpretation in context of The Lamb Blake has done a fine job in maintaining ambiguity about the ferociousness of the Tiger - whether it makes Almighty tenderless or was it really necessary to create an animal like Tiger for maintaining balance in nature.
sanyam
Whitney Jones · 17 December 2007
It’s important to understand that everything for William Blake was inside the mind. So the landscapes of innocence (the pastoral country side) and experience (blood-stained cities) are actually psychological landscapes; they are the minds of the innocent, and of the experienced. The innocent mind is accepting and has an answer for every question. The experienced mind has no answers, only fears. It cannot conform the seemingly contradictory ideas of the tiger and the lamb with the idea of a compassionate god. The speaker of the poem is an experienced mind, incapable of reaching the ultimate goal, the state of organized innocence.
i · 26 March 2008
what is this poem about???