The Tyger by William Blake
"The Tyger" is a lyric poem by William Blake that explores profound questions about the nature of creation and the duality of existence. Comprising twenty-four lines, the poem addresses the paradox of how a benevolent creator can also be responsible for the existence of fearsome and violent creatures. Set within Blake's broader thematic framework of duality, it contrasts the innocence embodied by the lamb with the terrifying beauty of the tiger, highlighting the complexities of good and evil. The poem features a childlike speaker who marvels at the tiger's fierce attributes while posing unanswerable questions about its origin, suggesting a deeper inquiry into the nature of divinity. Stylistically, "The Tyger" employs a rhythmic and incantatory quality, with vivid imagery and metaphorical language that engage the reader in contemplating the mysteries of existence. The tiger itself symbolizes more than mere evil; it embodies a passionate beauty that challenges simplistic notions of morality. Ultimately, Blake invites readers to reflect on the coexistence of wonder and terror in the universe, leaving them with a sense of awe at the incomprehensible nature of creation.
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Subject Terms
The Tyger by William Blake
First published: 1794, in Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Type of poem: Lyric
The Poem
“The Tyger” is a short lyric poem of twenty-four lines that asks, without giving explicit answers, how an all-perfect God responsible for innocence and goodness can be the creator of violence and evil. Its questions are unanswerable, for they search a realm altogether beyond human understanding. Divine creation occurs outside time and place through a being who is, by definition, incomprehensible and worthy of the childlike wonder expressed by the poem’s speaker before the terrible beauty of a dark, alien reality.
That William Blake envisioned all reality as a duality of light and dark, peace and violence, good and evil, and innocence and experience is indicated by the full title of the volume in which “The Tyger” appeared: Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. According to Blake’s private mythology, the ideal is an artistically and imaginatively unified humanity (or cosmos) harmonizing the contraries, which, in this volume of his poetry, are split into psychological realms of innocence (vulnerable to victimization by a stifling adult world) and of experience (a fallen world of suffering, evil, and division). Thus, instead of an integrated primal human being, there is in this volume a poem of innocence entitled “The Lamb” juxtaposed to its contrary, “The Tyger,” arguably the greatest and most cryptic lyric poem in Blake’s entire literary canon.
The poem begins with a childlike speaker directly addressing a tiger and receiving no answers to repeated questions about its creation. The first three quatrains describe the beast in terms of a frightening beauty: The tiger is a fiery, luminescent intrusion in the dark forests of the world of experience; it is paradoxically frightening and well-proportioned; its eyes burn ferociously; its heart smoulders with pent-up energy; and its feet evoke dread. The poem asks how a being of divine might (“hand”) and divine design (“eye”) could create this terrible beauty (lines 3-4). In what primordial deep or mysterious steep (as in the Genesis account of the universe’s creation) did the being fashion this fiery beast? Where did the being get the rebellious pride of a Satan, a Daedalus, or a Prometheus to defy the natural order of things and seize the fire engendering this monstrous creature? What kind of strength (“shoulder”), artistry (“art”), and force (“hand”) moulded the dreadful beauty into existence (lines 9-12)?
The fourth quatrain depicts the Creator as an omnipotent blacksmith keeping the beast under rein with a “chain” as the Creator fashioned its mind and yet remained supremely impervious to its terror (lines 13-16). The fifth quatrain is the most difficult to decipher and continues to stress the being’s transcendent omnipotence through an obscure reference to God’s victory over the rebellious angels in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). The defeated rebel angels become transmuted into stars surrendering their spears in shower-producing tears (Blake’s contemporaries called shooting stars “angel tears”). The all-powerful being paradoxically created this evil and destroyed it, in the same way that this being made the lamb (see Blake’s poem of that title) and its opposite, the tiger (lines 19-20).
How can this be? The final quatrain repeats the first quatrain with haunting effect to deny readers an easy answer to this question, yet it suggests that the creation of evil by the Creator of goodness is true and beautiful, even if the divine paradox is beyond human comprehension.
Forms and Devices
“The Tyger” consists of six quatrains, each with couplet rhymes and a rapid singsong meter of three trochaics and one stressed sound in every line (“Týgěr! Týgěr! búrnǐng bríght”). Consonance and assonance are pronounced, especially in the repetition of s and long i sounds throughout the poem. The complex sound system has the incantatory effect of a visionary nursery rhyme, with a childlike speaker probing very adult questions about the ultimate meaning of what remains the mystery of reality.
Like other songs of innocence and experience, “The Tyger” is a miracle of compressed metaphor, word usage, and symbol that explode into a multiple suggestiveness helping the poem attempt to perform the impossible, to apprehend the ineffable, and to rest in wonder before the inscrutable spectacle of a Creator of contraries, of unity supreme over dualities and contradictions.
Compressed metaphors equate the Creator to a blacksmith (lines 13-16) and equate the creation of the tiger to the reckless daring of archetypal rebels such as Satan and Daedalus, who stormed the heavens on wings, or Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods to give light and warmth to the human race (lines 7-8). Compressed word usage (in, for example, line 10) generates the double meaning of a Creator fashioning a heart out of twisted sinew and knotting up the heart to produce pent-up energy in the tiger. Blake’s ellipsis (the deletion of words to the bare minimum needed for communication) pervades the description of the tiger’s traits and the Creator’s attributes. Compressed allusions to Milton’s conquered rebel angels, to the Genesis account of primordial Creation, and to Blake’s “The Lamb” occur in the fifth quatrain to underscore the paradoxical omnipotence of the Creator.
Finally, the tiger itself is a famous example of a compressed and evocative symbol. Blake was a painter-engraver who added colored pictures to accompany the texts of many of the poems in Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Since “The Tyger” included a small painted representation of a four-footed “symmetrical” animal, a reader’s contemplation of the tiger symbol involved both reading and seeing it. The visual and printed symbol of the tiger has an immense complexity of meaning. The tiger signifies more than evil; it also suggests a mysterious, passionate, and violent beauty at odds with the pat, peaceful innocence of its contrary, the symbol of the lamb in Blake’s complementary poem. At the time of the French Revolution, the tiger was popularly conceived as a symbol of revolution. Blake welcomed the French Revolution and might have intended his tiger to be a symbol of something more than repellent evil. The tiger is, although terrifying, part of God’s all-beautiful creation, beyond the human ability to comprehend completely.