The Tyger

Question 1

Metre

Answer 1

Trochaic

Question 2

Predominant sentence type used in poem

Answer 2

Interrogative

Question 3

Criticism of

Answer 3

Protestant Christianity

• theological query into the motivations of creation itself
• builds upon religious Christian theme of its poetic predecessor and asks questions concerning what Blake believed to be the existence of evil
• brings to light problems that would be the philosophical and theological cornerstone of his romantic artistry

Question 4

Form

Answer 4

Six quatrains, assonance rune

• pattern AABB
• simple structure and vocab, reader able to understand main topics and concepts
• evil and good

Question 5

‘Immortal’

Answer 5

Poet refers to God

Question 6

What was the tiger a symbol of in the 1790’s

Answer 6

the Parisian revolutionary mob - a metaphor for the things that were happening - terrifying nature of the French Revolution

Question 7

What is the poem actually about!

Answer 7

Poem which looks at ideas of creation
- how could something that started off with such a virtuous intention (democracy and justice) that initially the French Revolution stood for - how could it turn into such a massacre

Question 8

What is in the rhythm?

Answer 8

Trochees - pounding and relentless moving forward

A while reverse lines look simplistic they are actually very unusual for a nursery rhyme

Question 9

Fire imagery

Answer 9

The hammer, the chain, the anvil - Blake imagining God as a Blacksmith working with a hard to manage substance

Question 10

‘Dread’

Answer 10

Ideas of the sublime - reference to Milton (Satan)

- Satan tried to fly up to God to attack him - ambition

Question 11

Prometheus

Answer 11

Stole fire from the Gods to give to mankind - imprisoned for 30,000 years

Question 12

Caesura

Answer 12

Short sentences, short lines. Pause

Question 13

Questions

Answer 13

Kind of rhetorical - no answer

Question 14

Innocence - Safety

Answer 14

Experience -danger, ambition, dare, sense of complete audacity

Question 15

What do the key words and aggressive trochaic rhythm tell us?

Answer 15

The poem deals with a darkly intense and awe- inspiring experience

Question 16

Poem on a metaphorical level

Answer 16

Tigers can’t burn and nights don’t have forests

Question 17

Three elements of metaphors according to Richards

Answer 17

A tenor - meaning behind it

• a vehicle - image used
• a ground - basis of the comparison

Question 18

What is interesting about Blake’s tiger metaphor

Answer 18

It’s all vehicle and no tenor - what the tiger is intended to express is never made clear

Question 19

What is the tigers creation

Answer 19

An act of confrontation and audacity

Question 20

How does the poem shift?

Answer 20

Between ‘could’ and ‘dare’

• implying transgression and disobedience
• ending in ‘dare’ in last stanza is a direct repeat of the first expect for the change of verb at the start of the final line

Question 21

Rebellion and revolution

Answer 21

Satan’s revolt in Paradise Lost

Question 22

Industry

Answer 22

Unlike the lamb who is ‘made’ by God, the tiger owes its existence to a combination of human labour and industrial process

Question 23

What does stanza four do?

Answer 23

Conserves the tigers creation in terms of industry - using a series of metonymy for the Blacksmith’s forge ‘hammer’ ‘chain’

Question 24

What was Blake repelled by?

Answer 24

The industrial revolution for its objectification of human beings

• this stanza has undeniable energetic and a fascination with what industry can produce
• the worker and tiger are represented with a strange combination of body parts ‘shoulder’ ‘heart’
• parallel drawn between the creature constructed in a ‘workshop of filthy creation’ in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein - another text which draws upon both Paradise lost and the Prometheus myth

Question 25

What does the lamb offer that the tiger doesn’t?

Answer 25

Lamb offers the reader simple certainties, benign God of the New Testament - Tyger presents creation as enigmatic and unknowable

Question 26

What is impossible in Blake’s creation poems?

Answer 26

Faith | - ‘the tyger’ becomes a part of the Experiences poems pessimism and anguish

Question 27

What is the radical nature of Blake’s poems due to?

Answer 27

It’s ambiguity and it’s lack of clear moral explanation

Question 28

What does Blake reveal?

Answer 28

‘The forests of the night’ is a place where we may dare to aspire and unleash the ‘fearful symmetry’ of the imagination’

Question 29

Blake thought that Milton was:

Answer 29

‘Of the devils party without knowing it’ - Milton tries to justify the ways of God to man - you can’t do this - he thinks he is so much of a wonderful poet that he can do this

Question 30

Milton’s characters

Answer 30

The so called good characters have little to them where the characters who are vibrant and charismatic are the fallen angels and Satan

Question 31

What is different about the poem the lamb?

Answer 31

There is no religious uncertainty - talking literally about a lamb and the lamb as a religious metaphor - gentleness, meekness and mildness