The style and mood of the two poems is very different. The ‘I’ in ‘The Lamb’ is a child and this is reflected in the simple, straightforward language and the gentle, innocent imagery. For example, the questions are very direct:
‘Little Lamb who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?’
The lamb is described as feeding ‘By the stream and o’er the mead’ and wearing
‘Softest clothing, woolly, bright’. He has ‘such a tender voice’ it makes ‘all the vales rejoice’. These are images of nature as beautiful and joyous.
Like a child’s nursery rhyme, the poem uses repetition
‘Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee,
Little Lamb I’ll tell thee’
and simple words and rhymes, such as ‘child’ and ‘mild’. It has a clear and simple structure, with the question being asked in the first stanza and answered in the second and its tone is that of a kindly adult speaking to a beloved child.
In contrast, ‘The Tyger’ is a longer and much darker and more mysterious poem. The mystery arises not only from the questions not being answered, but also because of the strange images that Blake conjures up of how the tiger was created. Neither do we know who is asking the questions in this poem. However, the complexity of the language and the type of vocabulary used show that it is certainly not an innocent child, as in ‘The Lamb’.
The picture created in the first two lines of a dark forest lit only by the brightness of the predatory tiger immediately creates a sense of night-time menace that is quite the opposite of the bright, pastoral imagery in ‘The Lamb’. The questions asked in ‘The Tyger’ are less direct, such as
‘In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?’
It is full of images of fire and power. For instance, Blake describes the tiger as ‘burning bright’ and uses references to a blacksmith’s forge to describe how he was created,
‘What the hammer? What the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?’
The mechanical nature of the images reflects the poet’s view of industrialisation. The blazing hot forge is producing something the world might be better off without.
The poem contains several images of violence, as in the hand that ‘dare seize the fire’, the twisting of the sinews of the tiger’s heart and the reference to ‘deadly terrors’. It also has a steady, rhythmic beat like a heart, or a tiger gaining steadily on its prey, which creates an air of menace, while ‘The Lamb’ is more flowing.
Both poems have an essentially religious or spiritual theme. However, only in ‘The Lamb’ is the poem’s question answered because it is clear from the second stanza that ‘He’ who ‘calls himself a Lamb’ and ‘became a little child’ is the Christian God. The God Blake is describing here is a gentle one
‘He is meek and He is mild’.
Blake links the lamb (the symbol of Christ), the child and God closely together, ‘We are called by His name’,
suggesting a very close relationship between God and Man.
In ‘The Tyger’, the creator is not clearly identified, but he is vividly described as awesome and all-powerful in making a creature of such ‘fearful symmetry’. He was brave enough to ‘dare sieze the fire’ and strong enough to ‘twist the sinews’ of the tiger’s heart. His hand, feet and grasp are all described as ‘dread’ and the repetition of this word emphasises his fearsome power. The very beauty of the creature he has made is frightening: the tiger is described as having a ‘fearful symmetry’ because it is the very perfection of its body that makes it such an effective predator.
In this poem, Blake questions God when he asks if he was pleased with his creation,
‘When the stars threw down their spears,
And water’d heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?’
This vivid image of the stars flooding heaven with their weeping suggests that nature itself has been saddened by the creation of the tiger. There is no such suggestion in ‘The Lamb’ that perhaps God was not glad to have made the lamb. This is because it has not introduced any danger or evil into the world, unlike the tiger. Blake may also be suggesting that, with increasing technological advances, mankind is becoming powerful enough to create things which it might later regret having unleashed on the world. ‘The Tyger’ could therefore be seen as a warning to any ‘creator’ to think of the implications of their creations, because there are some things we should not dare to create, even though we are capable of doing so.
I enjoyed both these poems equally because each is very evocative in its own way. ‘The Lamb’ evokes the innocent delight of childhood and a natural world that is pleasant and picturesque. ‘The Tyger’, on the other hand, vividly depicts a dangerous creature in a dark, threatening world
‘Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night;’
The fact that the poems complement each other helps me to understand them because I feel that Blake is describing the two extremes of God’s creation, and through them the two sides of human nature, in a more effective and immediate way than if he had attempted to do so in a single poem. On the surface, ‘The Lamb’ seems a very simple poem. The complexity of the concept it expresses regarding the nature of God’s relationship with Man emerges most clearly by reading it in conjunction with ‘The Tyger’.
Through these two related but very different poems, Blake has successfully brought into sharp contrast the two different faces of God, which seem to be revealed if we look at the world he created. His world contains the harmless, gentle lamb but also the menacing tiger. Blake asks the thought-provoking question to the tiger
‘Did he who made the Lamb make thee?’
and the two poems read together bring out very forcefully his point that God did not only create the good and beautiful things in the world but the dreadful and frightening ones also. Man has a close relationship with God and Man, too, is capable of producing both useful and destructive things. Blake clearly identifies childhood with innocence but suggests that, with experience, this innocence is lost and adults have to face the darker side of life and perhaps find themselves asking questions of God that are not as easily answered as the question asked by the child in ‘The Lamb’.