William Blake: The Tyger Flashcards
Summary
The poet addresses the tyger in order to find out what Devine purpose it serves.
Each stanza contains questions that refine the first question asked.
Form
The poem is comprised of six quatrains in rhymed couplets. The meter is regular and rhythmic, its hammering beat suggestive of the smithy that is the poem’s central image. The simplicity and neat proportions of the poems form perfectly suit its regular structure, in which a string of questions all contribute to the articulation of a single, central idea.
what does the undeniable existence of evil and violence in…
what does the undeniable existence of evil and violence in the world tell us about the nature of God, (what immortal hand or eye) and what does it mean to live in a world where a being can at once contain both beauty and horror?
The forgery where the tyger was created.
‘What the hammer…/furnace was thy brain…/ what the anvil?’
Trochaic metre makes the poem sound like it was made in a forgery.
One of the central themes in Blakes work is the creator is a Blacksmith. The poem can be critically argued to Blake himself breaking the forth wall and talking about himself as a creator as well as God
The French revolution
The revolution was about over throwing a corrupt government with pure ideologies; Liberté, égalité, fraternité. What followed was the reign on terror.
The narraters question; ‘did he who make the lamb make thee?’ Can be interpreted as did the people who dreamt of these pure ideologies commit these terrible monstrosities.
T.S.Elliot criticism
Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ is a great example of T S Eliot’s claim that ‘Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood’. A quick scan of its key words (‘burning’, ‘night’, ‘fearful’, ‘deeps’, ‘dread’, ‘deadly’, ‘terrors’), combined with the insistent, aggressive trochaic rhythm[1], tells us that the poem deals with a darkly intense and awe-inspiring experience. Pinning down exactly what that experience is, however, is very much more difficult.
the poem on a metaphorical level.
The poem clearly works on a metaphorical level: tigers can’t burn; nights don’t have forests. According to I A Richards, metaphors have three elements: a tenor (the meaning behind the metaphor), a vehicle (the image used) and a ground (the basis of the comparison).[2] What’s interesting about Blake’s tiger metaphor is that it’s all vehicle and no tenor; what the tiger is intended to express is never made clear.
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Appearing in Songs of Experience, ‘The Tyger’ is usually understood as the companion piece of ‘The Lamb’ in Songs of Innocence; both poems ask the same question: where do we come from? In ‘The Lamb’, an answer is given: God made us – a simple affirmation of faith. ‘The Tyger’ only implies the answer by posing the rhetorical question: ‘Did he who made the lamb make thee?’ Indeed, one of the most noticeable features of ‘The Tyger’ is that it takes the form of a series of questions, none of which are answered. Whereas ‘The Lamb’ posits the process of creation as natural and harmonious, ‘The Tyger’ shows us something much more violent and mysterious; the tiger comes from ‘the forests of the night’ and its eyes burn in ‘distant deeps and skies’. Its creation is an act of confrontation and audacity. The poem shifts between ‘could’ (ability) and ‘dare’ (which implies transgression and disobedience), ending in ‘dare’ in the final stanza, a direct repeat of the first except for the change of verb at the start of the final line, which is marked with a spondee[3] (‘Dare frame’) rather than the iamb[4] of the first stanza (‘Could frame’), emphasizing its significance.
Industrial Images
Another complex aspect of Blake’s metaphor is that, unlike the lamb, who is ‘made’ by God, the tiger owes its existence to a combination of human labour and industrial process. Stanza three focuses on human effort, the shoulder and the art which ‘twist the sinews of thy heart’. Stanza four conceives of the tiger’s creation in terms of industry, using a series of metonyms for the blacksmith’s forge: ‘hammer’, ‘chain’, ‘furnace’, ‘anvil’. While, like all the Romantics, Blake was repelled by the Industrial Revolution and its objectification of human beings, this stanza has undeniable energy and a fascination with what industry can produce: ‘what dread grasp | Dare its deadly terrors clasp?’ It’s interesting that both the worker and the tiger are represented by a strange combination of body parts (‘shoulder’, ‘heart’, ‘sinews’, ‘hand’, ‘feet’, ‘brain’). A parallel can perhaps be drawn with 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, asking questions about who makes us, and deploring industrialisation.
Poems references
The poem is full of references to rebellion: to Satan’s revolt in Paradise Lost (‘the stars threw down their spears’), to Prometheus, a favourite rebel of the Romantics (‘What the hand dare seize the fire?’), and, perhaps to Icarus (‘On what wings dare he aspire?’ – though this line might just as easily evoke Milton’s Satan). Such images have led some critics to see the tiger as a metaphor for revolution. As Peter Ackroyd suggests,
Imagination in ‘The Tyger’
For Blake, the imagination is the ultimate creative force: ‘What is now proved was once only imagined,’ he wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. His complex and enigmatic metaphor creates a space where imaginative energies can be released. Ever the enemy of narrow, earth-bound materialism, Blake reveals ‘the forests of the night’ as a place where we may dare to aspire and unleash the ‘fearful symmetry’ of the imagination.
