The starting verse shows power, conveying different visual colours of red orange and black, meaning fire. In direct comparison to the lamb, it is completely different, this is Gods tough side compared to his gentle side. ‘Fearful symmetry’ is the tiger, as it is centered and mirrored on both sides, the tigers stripes, orange and black like fire on the two sides of the tigers fur.
William Blake is saying that we should be scared of the tiger, its stripes are fearful and the way they are laid out is in symmetry. This is why Blake writes ‘fearful symmetry’ in line 4.
In the second verse, Blake creates a vast prospective in the poem in lines 5 to 9 when he says ‘in what distant deeps or skies, burnt the fire of thine eyes?’.
Also, in line 8 seize the fire means that they are maybe trying to catch the tiger and are therefore saying that the tiger is like fire with its colours and stripes, just like the colours in a fire.
The next verse in line 10 where it says ‘twist the sinews’ is saying that the tiger should be or is twisted. All the other words in the sustained metaphor are hammer, chain, furnace and grasp are all like the metaphor of God being a blacksmith.
By the fourth stanza the rhythm is increased when there is five questions in one verse compared to one question in the first verse of the poem.
William Blake creates an atmosphere of questions in ‘The Tiger’ because of the fourteen questions asked.
‘The Lamb’ was written before ‘The Tiger’ and is the shortest of the two. William Blake writes the poem as if it was childlike, so much so, that it seems like a child wrote it. The rhyme scheme of this poem is AABB, just like ‘The Tiger’.
Through the first verse of ‘The Lamb’, there are many rhyming couplets, for example: ‘feed’ and ‘mead’, ‘delight’ and ‘bright’, and ‘voice’ and ‘rejoice’.
The poem starts of with ‘little lamb who made thee’ which is relating to William Blake’s view of God and creation, even though Blake believed in God he did not agree with the established church.
Through lines 3 and 4, ‘gave the life and bid the feed By the stream and o’er the mead.’, there is an example of enjambment, this is when the line of poetry runs on the new line. In this quote ‘mead’ is mentioned, and it means meadow, so the line basically says where the lamb lives, what it does, and what the land looks like.
In ‘The Lamb’, Blake tries to show the vulnerability of the lamb. It hasn’t any power and is so small and feeble yet it balances out Gods creation of the tiger. In line 6 the quote ‘softest, clothing, wooly, bright. The softness of its clothing (wool) shows us the purity of its life. Line seven ‘gave thee such a tender voice’ shows us that the lamb is full of joyfulness as it leaps around in its innocent life. Once we get to the second stanza, Blake starts to compare it to the lamb of God. The second verse has many more rhyming couplets, such as ‘mild’ and ‘child’ and ‘name’ and ‘lamb’.
My conclusion of William Blake’s ‘The Tiger’ and ‘The Lamb’ is that the poems both represent the creation of God, but different sides of his creation. I think that my favorite poem is ‘The Tiger’, because it is more descriptive and has more visual imagery than ‘The Lamb. Also, ‘The Lamb’ seems to be for small children rather than for 14 year olds. ‘The Lamb’ is quite a well written poem, but when it comes head to head with ‘The Tiger’, it loses!
