Tyger

Question 1

Context

Answer 1

“The Tyger” is a poem by visionary English poet William Blake, and is often said to be the most widely anthologized poem in the English language. It consists entirely of questions about the nature of God and creation, particularly whether the same God that created vulnerable beings like the lamb could also have made the fearsome tiger. The tiger becomes a symbol for one of religion’s most difficult questions: why does God allow evil to exist? At the same time, however, the poem is an expression of marvel and wonder at the tiger and its fearsome power, and by extension the power of both nature and God.

Question 2

The Existence of Evil

Answer 2

• Like its sister poem, “The Lamb,” “The Tyger” expresses awe at the marvels of God’s creation, represented here by a tiger. But the tiger poses a problem: everything about it seems to embody fear, danger, and terror. In a series of questions, the speaker of “The Tyger” wonders whether this creature was really created by the same God who made the world’s gentle and joyful creatures. And if the tiger was created by God, why did God choose to create such a fearsome animal? Through the example of the tiger, the poem examines the existence of evil in the world, asking the same question in many ways: if God created everything and is all-powerful, why does evil exist?
• The speaker tries to reconcile the tiger’s frightening nature with the idea of a loving God, but this attempt leads only to a series of seemingly unanswerable questions. The tiger is presented as an impressive figure and seems to be part of God’s design for the world. It “burns brightly” and has a “symmetry,” a quality which Blake often associates with beauty and purposeful intent on God’s part. But that “symmetry” is also “fearful.” The tiger seems designed to kill and inflict pain. In other words, the tiger behaves in a way that seems counter to God’s laws and ethics. The tiger’s association with fire (“burning brightly,” for example) underscores this point—it’s visually impressive but dangerous to get close to.
• The poem then meditates on the specific moment of the tiger’s creation (“when thy heart began to beat”). It questions God’s motivations in making the tiger, even considering the possibility that it wasn’t actually God who made the tiger. The speaker struggles to understand how a God that made the small, vulnerable lamb could also choose to make a being that would surely eat the lamb given half a chance. In other words, the speaker struggles to understand why God would create something that seems to have destruction as its very purpose.
• The poem leaves this line of questioning unanswered, though the questions are themselves made very clear and stark. They are, essentially, handed over to the reader to consider; the speaker doesn’t know for sure why God has created something that seems evil. However, by detailing the tiger’s fearsomeness and by directly comparing it to the innocent and gentle lamb, the poem hints that perhaps both creatures are necessary parts of God’s creation. That is, perhaps the majesty of God’s work requires these kinds of oppositional forces. By giving the tiger the same kind of consideration as the lamb, the speaker suggests that without fear and danger, there could be no love and joy.

Question 3

Creativity

Answer 3

• Though “The Tyger” is specifically about how the nature of God’s creation can be reconciled with the existence of the fearsome tiger, it’s also about creativity more generally. Everything about the creation of the tiger suggests effort, skill, artistry, and imagination on the creator’s part, suggesting that these qualities are necessary to create anything as frighteningly beautiful as the tiger. What’s more, the speaker also hints that good creation—in art, for example—needs to incorporate this more dangerous and intimidating side of the world. Without that complexity, the poem suggests, a work of art won’t be fully honest and authentic.
• The poem is itself, of course, the product of intense creativity. Blake revised and revised this poem, trying to pin it down to the exact form that best embodies its complicated questions. This artistry is mirrored by some of the word choices made throughout. For example, the “framing” of “symmetry” (lines 4 and 24) suggests a visual artist or engraver (like Blake himself) making sure the proportions of a project are correct. This type of language, which characterizes creativity as both effort and skill, is also found in the third and fourth stanzas. The fourth stanza in particular describes a metal workshop, where beautiful things are made under intensely hot and pressured conditions.
• Along these lines, it’s also important to note the way in which the creation of the tiger is consistently linked with fire. Indeed, the tiger itself is a kind of fiery creature, testament to the intense imagination with which it was created. Imagination itself is characterized as a kind of fire from which things can be created, if the creator is brave, strong, and skilled enough. There may even be an allusion to the Greek myth of Prometheus here, who tricked the gods, stealing fire and giving it to humanity. However, Prometheus was not rewarded for his ingenuity; instead, he was condemned to eternal punishment.

Question 4

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Answer 4

• The first stanza sets up the poem’s main thematic questions: Who created the tiger, how, and why? The speaker in this poem’s sister poem, “The Lamb,” is able to identify God as the creator of the lamb because the small creature seems to represent joy, love, and freedom—but the tiger is an entirely different figure altogether. The poem does imply that God created the tiger too, but in the tiger’s threat of violence and capacity for killing, it’s harder for human beings to understand God’s motivations for creating it. Essentially, the main aim of the poem is to flesh out this mystery, and to hint at possible answers.
• The poem begins with an instance of epizeuxis, with the immediate repetition of “Tyger,” which signals to the reader that the tiger is the central figure throughout. And like “The Lamb,” “The Tyger” directly addresses the central figure with apostrophe throughout. Indeed, the poem is a kind of awed and fearful meditation on the fact of the tiger’s existence. The alliterative “burning bright” creates the visual image of a flash of impressive color moving through the “forests of the night”—which is both a beautiful sight and a terrifying one. Though the poem predates the theories of psychoanalysis put forward by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, the “forests” can be interpreted both as the tiger’s literal habitat and as a symbol of the human subconscious/unconscious. As this is a poem in part about creativity, the dark and mysterious atmosphere of the forest hints at the mysteries of creation—both in the human and the godly realms.
• But rather than suggesting God was wrong to create things that seem evil, the poem seems to indicate that elements of God’s design for the world are simply beyond the limits of human understanding. People can see evidence of God’s divine will, and worship it, but they should never claim to know and understand it fully. Life is full of these mysteries, which is why the rest of the poem consists entirely of rhetorical questions. The poem seeks to illuminate the parts of existence that humans cannot fully comprehend, not in order to explain them away, but rather to marvel cautiously at their presence.

Question 5

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?

Answer 5

• The second stanza begins by asking where the tiger was created. The speaker pictures this place to be almost unimaginable, its intense strangeness emphasized by the alliterative “distant deeps.” The mention of “deeps or skies” could also be a reference to hell and heaven, suggesting a sense of uncertainty about where exactly the tiger comes from—God’s domain, or the devil’s.
• As in the first stanza, the tiger is again linked to fire in line 6. The fire in the tiger’s eyes is suggestive of the creature’s fearsome power and, further, its natural skill at hunting and killing. Line 7 seems to make reference to angels by mentioning “wings,” but this reference could be either to the virtuous angels of heaven or those that have fallen, like Satan himself (indeed, the fifth stanza later seems to support this idea). Either way, the narrator is pointing towards a causal chain of events that brought the tiger into being. That is, God created heaven, hell, and earth; he granted the world a capacity for evil as well as good; and some of his own creatures took on evil identities. So whether the tiger was created by angels, devils, or God himself, it all ultimately leads back to God. The thing that puzzles the narrator is why God wouldn’t just populate the world with goodness; the narrator wants to know why fear, violence, and evil need to exist in the first place.
• A possible answer lies in this idea of bravery itself, and in Blake’s overall project. Across his work, Blake doesn’t argue for some kind of sanitized world in which everything is nice and safe—the collection from which this poem is called not just Innocence, but Innocence and Experience. In Blake’s view, all living creatures are the expression of God’s divine will—everything is a part of God. Creatures as different as the lamb and the tiger, then, are both part of the full expression of God’s will. And in the case of this poem, the suggestion is that these contrary states—bravery and fear, for example—cannot exist without one another. Without something to fear, there would be no courage—and perhaps this explains the presence of evil in the world. The tiger, of course, is not an inherently evil creature, but it is suggestive of evil in that it poses a dangerous and fearsome threat to other creatures.

Question 6

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

Answer 6

• The third stanza continues the poem’s established pattern of rhetorical questioning, here considering the tiger’s creation and imagining the physical strength (and creative skill) of its creator. As with much of the poem, there is a kind of paradox at play. The tiger is such a strong and “dread” creature that only a being more strong and dread would have the capacity to create it.
• For most of this stanza, the poem discusses physical effort. The tiger is such a powerful, muscular creature that the narrator wonders “what shoulder” could create it. These words conjure an image of the sheer force of the tiger’s creator, whose “shoulder” is strong enough to “twist the sinews” of the tiger—in other words, to give it life. But “heart,” of course, can relate to more than just the tiger’s physical form; it can also relate to the tiger’s way of perceiving and experiencing the world. When people talk about something being “close to their heart,” they are talking about something important and central to their existence. The activities close to the tiger’s heart, in this sense, are finding prey, killing it, and eating it. The creator, then, also had to have a kind of bravery, a mental strength and skill (the “art” of line 9), to bring this kind of fearsomeness into the world.

Question 7

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

Answer 7

• The fourth stanza continues with the second’s in-depth consideration of the moment of the tiger’s creation. But there is an important shift here. While the second stanza looked at this moment abstractly and the third discussed the power of the creator, the fourth stanza speaks more specifically to craftsmanship and artistry.
• Here, the narrator tries imagine the kind of tools a creator would need to make a creature as fearsome and powerful as the tiger. The tools described are linked to a particularly industrial kind of craftsmanship, specifically relating to metalwork. The stanza conjures the image of a noisy industrial workshop, with the loud and bright assonant vowel sounds helping the poem to turn up its volume: hammer, chain, furnace, brain. Perhaps these images came readily to mind for Blake because of his own work as an engraver, which was a physically demanding process. But perhaps they also relate to the Industrial Revolution through which Blake was living. London was brimming with new factories and employees, and the streets were full of the cacophonous sound of metalwork. This change in society was something that Blake criticized, feeling that it was separating humankind from its natural habitat and ways of life. But just as the existence of the tiger suggests power almost beyond imagining, so too does the kind of industry described here create a sense of awesome creative power.
• Thinking again about the way Blake often shows two “contrary states” side by side, there is a sense here that the daringness to create something fearful is, in a way, the reason that bravery exists. Without terror and fear, bravery and courage would have nothing to define themselves against. In other words, being brave only happens in situations that are terrifying and fearful. Following that logic, perhaps the juxtaposition of fear and daring in this stanza is intended as an answer to the poem’s central question of why evil exists.

Question 8

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?

Answer 8

• The fifth stanza is the poem’s most notoriously ambiguous section. Though Blake was a devout Christian, he had his own very distinctive ideas about religion, myth, and cosmology. Indeed, he essentially constructed his own mythology that took an idiosyncratic understanding of Christianity as its building blocks.
• The most likely intention behind lines 17 and 18 is that they are a reference to the rebellion of angels, led by Satan, against God. Blake was heavily influenced by the poet John Milton, and there is certainly some overlap here with Milton’s Paradise Lost. In Paradise Lost, the rebellious angels admit defeat in the face of God’s awesome power—they “throw down their spears.” It’s strongly hinted that this moment of retreat or surrender coincides with the creation of the tiger—so perhaps the existence of the tiger is such clear evidence of God’s strength that the rebels have to admit defeat. Nonetheless, these fallen angels water “heaven” with their tears, showing how evil and suffering are now an integral part of all existence—there is no going back.
• Lines 19 and 20 pose one of the poem’s central paradoxes: Was God happy (“Did he smile”) to have made the tiger? And, by extension, is God glad to have brought evil into existence? Or, if evil is man-made, is God happy to have created a world in which humankind could create evil? The poem makes use of anaphora through the repeated “Did he” at the start of these two rhetorical questions. The repetition helps mark this as the poem’s key moment. Essentially, the narrator marvels at the question of whether the same creator could possibly make the lamb and the tiger. They are such different creatures that if a single creator did make them both, then it’s very hard to understand that creator’s motivations.

Question 9

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

Answer 9

• The final stanza is a refrain of the first. The first stanza posed the poem’s central question—who could possibly create the fearsome tiger?—and the following stanzas deepened this question, asking not just who, but also why, how, and under what conditions and motivations the tiger came to be. The use of refrain here packs all of those other questions back into the first question—it seems that understanding the identity of the tiger’s creator somehow explains all the other questions. In other words, God created the tiger—and that’s the only answer that the speaker can provide. In this conclusion, the poem suggests that humans cannot hope to fully comprehend the way in which God’s divine will actually works. They can only marvel at it and live in accordance with God’s will.
• There is one key difference between the first and final stanzas (apart from the subtle changes in punctuation). In line 4, the narrator asks which “immortal” being “could” create such terrifying animals as tigers (or, indeed, anything that seems evil). In other words, the question in the first stanza was: Who has the capacity and ability to create such works? Here, though, that question is subtly but importantly reframed. The narrator, having carefully imagined the tiger’s moment of creation, now asks who would dare to create the tiger. The question is no longer about ability, but about daring.
• This shift speaks in part to the poem’s broader theme of creation and art generally—creators need to be daring if they want their creations to be powerful. Blake himself embodies this attitude quite clearly; his art was so bold that he was generally considered a madman during his own time. What’s more, this stanza’s pointed use of the word “dare” suggests that there is something inherently brave about bringing the tiger (and other terrifying things) into existence. God created a world that wasn’t just a nice, safe, and happy place, but rather one that contains the full range of possible experiences. Indeed, the poem suggests that bravery can only exist if there is something to fear. Finally, the tiger also represents the part of God that is beyond the limits of human understanding. Humans shouldn’t pretend to know everything about existence, the poem seems to say, but should instead “dare” to explore the world through experiences—even (or especially) frightening ones.

Question 10

The Tyger

Answer 10

• Like the lamb in Blake’s poem of the same name, the tiger represents an aspect of God. Whereas the lamb seems to suggest that God is Ioving and tender, in line with the idea of a fatherly God overseeing his flock, the tiger speaks to another side of God’s character.
• The poem gently suggests that God created the tiger, but it also allows for the possibility that it was Satan who did so (as one of the fallen angels that line 17 might be describing). Either way, God is ultimately responsible, since (in the Christian tradition) God created heaven, earth, and hell. The tiger is therefore symbolic of God’s ability to be violent and frightening, traits which seem to be at odds with the creator who made the small and vulnerable lamb. The tiger, then, also represents the unknowability of God: humankind can love God and be in awe of his creations, but it can never hope to fully comprehend the way that God operates within and conceives of the world.
• “The Tyger” is ultimately less about actual tigers (or other specific frightening things) and more about all the large concepts that humanity finds it difficult to comprehend. God created the world, but the world is full of suffering, pain, hatred and violence. The tiger thus symbols those parts of God (and the world) that humans struggle to reconcile with their idea of God.

Question 11

Fire

Answer 11

• The poem picks up on the visual appearance of the tiger—its bright orange striped coat—and associates this with fire. This helps to characterize the tiger as dangerous and destructive, and to generally create a tense atmosphere throughout the poem.
• But fire also represents the imagination, both of the ultimate creator—God—and of more humble human artists and craftspeople. The imagined creator in the poem literally draws the tiger from the fire, which is presented as the kind of necessarily harsh and pressurized environment from which something as majestic and fearsome as the tiger could be made. The implication here is that true creation requires bravery—that is, a willingness to put a hand into the fires of the imagination and make something. The symbol of fire shows that the poem holds the creative act in high regard.
• Finally, fire may also symbolize a connection to hell (“distant deeps,” line 5) or Satan in the poem. The speaker suggests that God created the tiger, while also leaving open the possibility (particularly in line 17) that Satan was the one responsible for the tiger—and perhaps for evil more generally. Notably, however, this fire isn’t presented as a wholly bad thing, even if it does come from hell; instead, it’s shown to be a necessary part of creating something as darkly wondrous as the tiger. Through the images of fire as a productive force, the speaker suggests that even if evil forces like hell and Satan do play a part in shaping the world, they’re still components of God’s larger plan for creation.

Question 12

Industrial tools

Answer 12

• The fourth stanza is the only one in which the speaker imagines the tiger’s creator using tools. The ones described are all industrial tools, which allows the stanza to build the noisy and fiery atmosphere of a metal workshop. These tools symbolize a certain type of creativity, in which skill and vision alone are not enough. Rather, the creator also needs willpower and bravery in order to build meaningful creations.
• Additionally, the “hammer,” “chain,” “furnace,” and “anvil” are all distinctly industrial (as opposed to, say, paintbrushes and canvas). This choice of symbols evokes the Industrial Revolution, which was at full pace during Blake’s lifetime. If the tiger does represent a kind of evil, then perhaps this moral judgment extends to the practices of industry too. However, the poem resists such conclusive interpretations. Rather, this symbol seems to showcase the way that artistry, ugliness, and danger all exist in close proximity.

Question 13

Form

Answer 13

• “The Tyger” consists of six quatrains. The first and last quatrains are almost identical, with subtle differences in their punctuation and the change of the word “could” to “dare.” This is important because the four stanzas in between characterize the creator that made the tiger as being daring—that is, the tiger is a fearsome creature and its creator must have been brave to make it. Assuming the creator to be God, the one-word change between the first and last stanzas speaks to the fact that God was not just able to make the tiger, but willing. In other words, the speaker of the poem sees God as wanting to introduce fear and danger into the world—and the motivation for that desire is one of the poem’s central mysteries.
• The similarity between the first and final stanzas also gives the poem its own “symmetry,” showcasing the kind of artistry and skill that the poem itself discusses as key parts of the act of creation. The form of the poem is itself “framed” symmetrically, just like the tiger.
• The other important aspect of the form to consider is that the poem consists entirely of questions. This choice speaks to the fact that the poem has doubt and mystery at its heart. These are questions to which there are no clear available answers, but to the speaker, they nonetheless seem to confirm God’s power.

Question 14

Meter

Answer 14

Tyger | Tyger, | burning | brightly

This would be a line of pure trochaic tetrameter, but the real line has what is called a catalectic final foot. This just means that it is missing an unstressed syllable at the end of the line. This trochaic catalectic meter—found in every line but lines 4, 10, 11, 18, and 24—creates a sense of pressure throughout the poem, as if the meter is reflecting the intense, fiery conditions under which the speaker imagines the tiger was created.

Question 15

Rhyme Scheme

Answer 15

“The Tyger” is written in rhyming couplets throughout, using the form:

AABB

• Each stanza has its own pair of rhymes following that same scheme. This steady rhyme pattern gives the poem a sense of forward propulsion—anything else would probably make the poem feel too disrupted, given that it already consists of abrupt rhetorical questions. The couplets also make the poem highly memorable, perhaps explaining why it occupies such a prominent position in English literature.
• The couplet format is also important because it creates symmetry, an idea that is important to Blake throughout his poetry and that he often relates to God’s intelligent design for the world. That is, the heavily patterned lines of the poem reflect the poem’s argument that there is a God and that this God has a plan—even if that plan isn’t completely comprehensible to humans

Question 16

Speaker

Answer 16

• The speaker in the poem is unspecified and is never uses the first person. The anonymous speaker is clearly in awe of both the tiger and the incredible powers of whatever creator made such a fearsome creature. Accordingly, the speaker is restless and doubtful, probing into the mysteries of the universe through a relentless series of rhetorical questions. The speaker is both intimated and amazed to think about the “dread” and “daringness” of whoever it was that made the tiger. The speaker’s key question is whether the same creator that made the tiger could be the one that made the lamb as well, since the lamb is a creature almost entirely opposite to the tiger.
• Because the speaker is anonymous and expresses such universal concerns, it seems almost as though the speaker could stand in for humanity as a whole. After all, most people do wonder about the same kinds of existential questions that the speaker brings up, and so the speaker could even be interpreted as humankind rather than a single individual.

Question 17

Literary context

Answer 17

A key poetic influence on Blake was John Milton, whose Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained also creatively examined humankind’s relationship to God. Indeed, the possibility that a creature with “wings” created the tiger (line 7) is possibly a reference to the war between God and Satan as outlined in Milton’s epic poem. Blake was also a wide reader of religious scholarship, which undoubtedly played a formative role in his poetry. For example, the influence of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish Lutheran theologian, can be seen in the way Blake consistently depicts the fundamental spirituality of humanity.

Question 18

Historical context

Answer 18

• Blake was a deeply religious man, but he was highly critical of the Church of England, and of organized religion more generally. He was born to a family of Dissenters, a group of English Protestants who broke away from and rebelled against the Church of England. Questioning the religious status quo was therefore instilled in Blake from a very young age. He saw top-down religious structures as restrictions on individual liberties, and as obstacles to the direct relationship between humankind and God. Blake’s rebellious streak owed something to the American and French revolutions, which gave thinkers opportunities to dream of better forms of society. Indeed, rebellion is hinted at throughout the poem, both in the danger and violence that the tiger represents and in lines 17 and 18, which seem to relate to some kind of heavenly battle (perhaps between God and Satan).
• Blake was also writing during the accelerating Industrial Revolution, and he saw its economic, social, and environmental changes as threats to humankind. For Blake, the factories of the Industrial Revolution represented a form of physical and mental enslavement—the “mind-forg’d manacles” mentioned in his poem “London.” “The Tyger” touches on the frightening nature of industry in stanza four, where the speaker describes the loud, fiery metalwork shop that may have created the tiger. Indeed, if the tiger is taken to represent evil, the poem may even be implying that evil comes from industry.
• As for tigers, they were certainly not a common sight in 18th century London. But Blake would have seen illustrations of tigers and, most likely, have seen live tigers in traveling shows. Most people find the illustration that often accompanies this poem quite comical, in that it doesn’t seem particularly fearsome, but if it was based on a traveling menagerie, it’s quite possible that what Blake saw was actually a tiger cub.