The Readers Review: Literature from 1714 to 1910 discussion

On April 12th, I have my final exams in English. One subject will be the poetry of Romanticism. I chose three poems by William Blake to prepare, but with one them I do not feel that comfortable. It is "The Tyger":

TIGER, tiger, 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?

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

I know that you should read The Tyger together with The Lamb. But I am not getting to the bottom line of the Tyger. I see that both poems are spiritual, the Lamb emphasising the positive message of the Christian belief. But what is the tiger? Is it God in all his power? Or is it the Evil? Are those poems contrastive, excluding each other or rather complementary elements, so to speak "two sides of the same coin"?

Thank you for sharing your ideas!

Hello Remi. Blake has always been one of my favourite poets and as a cat lover I learned this poem by heart when I was a young girl.

I think that it is a poem about Good and Evil and God's part in the latter. 'Did He who made the Lamb make thee?' Can someone responsible for both good and innocence also insert violence and evil into the world? If God smiled on the innocent Lamb, could he also smile upon the awful symmetry of the Tiger? Blake is, I think, presenting a moral critique of Christian belief and asking why there is evil in the world. Was it God or the Devil who created such a beast? And if God created the awful Tyger why did he do so? And why are there so many other evil things in the world created by this good God? These I think are Blake's questions here. They are perhaps the same questions many people asked when the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan.

His poem The Lamb is one of the Songs of Innocence and Tyger is one of the Songs of Experience - man is born into the world innocent but dies experienced in evil. Blake lived at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution when the world as he knew it was being torn about by huge manufacturing machines and railways. He makes a similar critique in his hymn Jerusalem - 'And Did the Countenance Divine/Shine forth upon our clouded hills/And was Jerusalem builded there/Among these dark Satanic Mills?'. Did the God who created 'England's pleasant pastures', which (supposedly) Jesus once walked upon, also create the Dark Satanic Mills? These were things that confused Blake all of his life.

Hello Remi!
I think that this is a very interesting and very complex poem, and I've done a lot of thinking about it. I think that Madge hit on two important points: 1)a creator who can create creatures of beauty and innocence as well as those that inspire violence and fear, 2) the rapid changes in British society and the English landscape brought on by the Industrial Revolution. I have always been intrigued by the stanza:
In what distant deeps or skies 5
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
This seems as though it could be a reference to Prometheus, who dared to seize fire and give it as a gift to mankind. It seems that Blake is seriously posing a question, rather than just bemoaning the dual nature of God. He asks, "Is it possible that there is another creative force at work in the universe, one with a darker vision?" Following man's ability to create fire came a host of technological innovations. In stanza 4, the language is very mechanical, and artificial:
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp 15
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
Maybe Blake was horrified in some ways by what humans were able to create, and the immense effect that the actions of some humans could have on the rest of England, and the world's, population.
What do you think? :)

Good post Miranda. The 'hand that seize the fire' could also be a reference to men in the huge steel smelting furnaces seen in England's industrial heartlands at that time. I remember them from my childhood, they were like images of Hell!

http://www.eborg2.com/Revelation/Rev0...

I absolutely love Blake. I have two ideas. Since "The Tyger" is the companion piece of "The Lamb" and if the Lamb stands for Christ / "Lamb of God" this "The Tyger" must be Devil or Lucifer who was the rebellious archangel of God's creation. It also answer the question, Did He who made the lamb make thee? and the answer is yes.

But if we step away from theology (although it's difficult in Blake's poems) I rather like the idea that they show the "Two contrary states of the human soul." So, when the Lamb is destroyed by Experience, the Tyger is needed (the Experience) to restore the world.

Thank you all for your inspiring ideas. MadgeUK and Miranda, I totally agree with you, phrases like "seize the fire", "hammer", "anvil" and "furnace" are a powerful semantic field and seem to be reflections on the contemporary experience of industrialization.

Miranda, I liked your focus on the human being. In The Lamb, the lyrical I gives answers to questions of the first stanza in the second stanza. My opinion: In contrast to its counterpart, in The Tyger only questions are raised. It remains completely open if there is an evil higher entity (like Satan) or if God has a dual nature (cf. "In what distant deeps or skies").

My suggestion: Since the lyrical I is never the same as the author, maybe Blake wanted to suggest that there is no object evil thing as such, that the evil is not there but it lies within us, in the eye of the beholder. We should not forget that for Blake his illuminations of the poems are essential for the reader and his/her contemplation of the poem (cf. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia...). What do we see there? A rather normal tiger. When I think of Blake's abilities to create powerful, even frightening depictions as in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, then I do not a see anything "fearful". As I said, the evil may lie in my perspective on things. Besides, in the poem itself the idea of the Romantic sublime is masterly processed.

What do you think?

It is your examination subject not mine Remi:). Good luck with it.

I am glad you found this thread, Funyon. I have always enjoyed reading Blake's poems. I especially like his Songs of Innocence and Experience.

Hi, Funyon, I’d never read “The Human Abstract” before—thanks for leading me to it! I like the way he uses paradox in the first few stanzas. I think he’s saying that when we get complacent (too comfortable to maintain our moral strength), we are vulnerable to hypocrisy. The deceit he speaks of seems to be self-deception.