All these events affected the way Blake wrote, in the way that he spoke about how the power of God can influence us, the world being a beautiful place, but man not being in harmony with it all. Where he lived was an awful place, he lived next to a graveyard and a workhouse. People died in the street and he witnessed it all, but he was still able to write about the simplicity and beauty of the world.
‘The Lamb’ appears to be about the poet talking to a tame lamb in a field’ but on a deeper level is about, the nature of God as shown through Jesus (also known as the ‘Lamb of God’) compared with an innocent lamb in the field.
Similarly, ‘The Tyger’ is apparently about the poet talking about the Tyger to himself, in a bush not too close by, just so that he can watch the Tyger safely.
Questions are asked throughout the poem. Note that they are all rhetorical, for example, ‘In what distant deeps or skies burnt the fire of thine eyes?’ This shows that the poet is wondering to himself about the creation of this magnificent creature. What powerful force could or even dare to create such an amazing creature of such strength and beauty? Its almost as if the poet is describing a creature that is not of this world.
The mood or tone of the two poems is very different. ‘The Lamb’ gives the reader mellow calm. There is nothing violent or powerful or even dangerous about a lamb, it makes you want to pet it because they are delicate and cute animals.
In contrast ‘the Tyger’ is quite the opposite, mood wise. A real sense of respect for this animal appears in the readers mind. Something with an “immortal hand or eye” made this creature, something with great power. Again, in contrast to the lamb, a Tyger can be quite a scary, foreboding creature you wouldn’t want to bump into in the dark in the wild, you’d probably run for your life if it so much as licked its lips at you. The ideal place for this creature to be seen is from inside a hide where it cannot see you; out of its way. This all emphasizes the respect for this creature.
Blake’s poetry is full of striking images. In ‘the Tyger’ the Tyger’s coat is compared to fire. This shows the idea that it has been made in a blacksmith’s workshop, “what the hammer what the chain”, “…anvil…” this is the key tool of a blacksmith. The image of fire is conveyed in the line “burnt the fire of thine eyes” this gives a dangerous feeling to the reader because fire can cause death and destruction, it is again conveyed in the line “in what furnace was thy brain”.
‘The lamb’ has less striking images and more soft calm ones. The line “ by the stream & o’er the mead” gives the first image of the landscape. This landscape, a meadow with a stream running through it, is a peaceful scene into which a lamb fits perfectly, this give the reader a good picture of where the poem is set. The lamb’s woolly coat is compared with “Clothing of Delight”. The effect of this metaphor is that in the sense that god has clothed the lamb. This underlines the religious factor that came into so many of Blake’s poems.
The two poems have very different structures. ‘The Tyger’ has quite a complex rhythm and stanzas, whereas ‘the lamb’ is simple because it only has two verses.
In ‘The Lamb’ there are two verses. Verse one asks a series of questions, asking whether the lam knows who created it “little lamb who made thee, dost thou know who made thee?”
Verse two answers these questions, saying that all creatures were somehow created in God’s image, “we are all called by his name”. Each verse is composed of two rhyming couplets and has a strong, regular rhythm very similar to that of a nursery rhyme. The use of repeated words and phrases makes the lines more powerful.
In contrast ‘the Tyger’ has six stanzas, each has its own rhetorical questions, but they all link to one question which is “who made the Tyger?”
The first and last stanzas are the same but for the first word in the last line. In the first stanza it says, “…Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” but in the last line it replaces ‘could’ with ‘dare.’ This shows that when the poet first saw the animal he thought the first question without thinking, just wondrous curiosity, but then once he has had a think about it he decides to rephrase the question so that it is more fitting to the creature in question.
The language used in both ‘the lamb’ and ‘the Tyger’ is very simple and quite suitable for a song of “innocence”. The alliteration of the “L” sound in ‘…little lamb…’ gives a delicate sounding start to the poem.
The use of old forms of address gives a very traditional feel to the poem (thee, thy etc). These are all ways of saying you, but we have ceased to use them, maybe it is because everyone else in Europe has only one word for ‘you’.
Blake occasionally takes out a letter in a word so that the line has the same amount of syllables as the one that preceded it. “By the stream & and o’er mead” the missing ‘v’ in over reduces the amount of syllables from two to one. This is so that the rhyming pattern will be even (6,6,7,7,7,7,7,7,6,6) instead of (6,6,7,8,7,7,7,7,6,6), also most of the rhymes in this poem are visual as well as oral this emphasizes the poems rhymes and thus allowing the message to get through clearer.
The language used in ‘the Tyger’ is, in places, very similar to that of ‘the lamb’. It uses alliteration in the phrase, “burning bright” to emphasize how striking the colour of this animals coat is.
It also uses the old forms of address and it too has visual rhymes as well as oral ones.
But what it has that ‘the lamb’ doesn’t is, it repeats words one after the other in the phrase “Tyger, Tyger”, this is used the same way alliteration is to stress the metaphor.
