As the poem goes on, the language starts to get more fierce, to create the image of destruction, but also the beauty of this creature. Blake once again, successfully links the good and bad details of the tiger with the way that society is at this time. The point that Blake is trying to convey is that, all living things may look or seem to have outstanding beauty, but deeper inside, we do not know whether it is friendly or ferocious. This point that is yielded into our minds is a fact. No one knows what is going on inside a person even if they seem to be nice, or even if they seem to be nasty, they could still be a loving compassionate person on the inside. Many of these emotions and terms of personality may never been shown, but they are still there. This is why Blake wrote this poem, to make people realize that everything in the world was not created to make things easier, but also to hinder our progress among society.
As we move onto the next poem, “The Donkey”, we see a dramatic change in how the poems are written. First of all, “The Tyger” was written in Blake’s perspective of what the tiger is like, and what its beauty is like, but in “The Donkey”, we read a poem, which is written in the viewpoint of a donkey, and how it feels about itself.
The title of the poem, “The Donkey”, makes us think that the poem is asinine, although it is not, as we soon find out whenever we read down thoroughly through the poem. In stanza 1, Chesterton charts the history of the donkey, even though he is highly uncertain of where it actually originated. In the first stanza, the tone is one of uncertainty, but it is also over exaggerated, as many of the readers would think.
As we move onto stanza 2, the perspective from the donkey evokes our sympathy for the creature, as even it is putting itself down, by agreeing that he may be ugly, slow, dumb and annoying. From this stanza, we learn that the donkey has absolutely no self-esteem, and that the donkey thinks that it is a joke that he is the ugliest of all animals on earth. So far the tone of the poem is one of sorrow, as the donkey does nothing but put itself below others.
In the midst of stanza 3, we read more sympathy evoking terminology that Chesterton uses to describe the donkey. We know that the donkey is aware of the fact that people ‘deride’ him, and consider him the lowest, most worthless animal of them all to be created. He dumbly accepts that he is what he is and he does not bother challenge the viewpoints on how other people see him, and what people have done to him over the many centuries that the animal has been around for. This stanza is yet again another one, which the tone is full of sorrow, and this is deliberate to summon sympathy from us for the donkey.
As we reach stanza 4, we see a sensational change in how the donkey speaks of itself. For once it is putting itself above others and is mocking us humans for treating it in the ways that we did. Also, for the first time, the donkey has gotten very confident within itself, and it is standing up to all the criticism that it has undergone. Religious factors are brought into the poem, to strengthen the poem, as the religion involved was about the entry into Jerusalem, just before Jesus was put on trial. In this ‘hour’, the donkey felt proud and privileged, and also ecstatic, as he got to carry the Son of God on his back into Jerusalem, even though he knew that he was bringing Jesus to his death.
The point that Chesterton is trying to make is that everything and everyone on earth should be respected, no matter how bad its defects are, or no matter how perfect it is, all living things should be respected equally instead of discriminated against for things it can not do anything about.
