English Literature Stage II Romanticism EN2
Practical Criticism: "The Tyger"
William Blake
Blake's poem "The Tyger" - written somewhere between 1785 and 1789 - was first published in Songs of Innocence and Experience. These two interconnected books of poetry were intended to show the "two contrary states of the human soul. Appropriately enough "The Tyger" appeared in the second book, Experience, and has as its natural counter part "The Lamb" in Innocence. "The Tyger" as a poem is a perennial international favourite. It has been more frequently and widely published than any other poem in English.
The diction and rhyme scheme of both poems suggest they were written for children which is ostensibly the intended audience for the Songs. However the choice of words and cadence works on far deeper levels than just creating a palatable nursery-rhyme rhythm for children. The lively trochaic metre, aswell as suggesting a nursery rhyme, could be likened to a chant or invocation. The repetition of "Tyger! Tyger!" with its double exclamation marks support this idea. It gives the whole poem a quasi-religious tone which is maintained - albeit ambiguously - throughout the poem. Simultaneously the exclaimed repetition of "Tyger! Tyger!" could be seen as an awed whisper, a terrified cry or an oath of some kind. The immediate stressed syllables at the start of the foot (Ty - ger! Ty - ger!) introduce an element of panic or of rapt, awestruck wonder. As if the narrator (and the reader) are placed directly before the tiger wrapped in its coat of flame.
The use of the words "Burning bright" emphasise the otherworldly nature of Blake's particular Tyger. The imagery is vivid, immediate and memorable. It suggests blazing colour (stark contrast to the verdure "..forests of the night). The tiger is a fiery creature and the urgency of fire is intensified by the exclamatory punctuation and the use of the continuous present with "Burning bright". In fact the imagery of the poem is arguably its most striking feature. There is repeated reference to flames with
"Burnt the fire of thine eyes?" and use of words like "furnace" This automatically, within the context of the poem and of Songs as a whole, conjures up images of a puritanical vision of hell intimating the tiger satanic roots (see below).
In the first stanza the alliteration of 't' and 'b', two hard consonants, enhances the sense of tension. When read aloud the alliteration encourages rapid reading and an staccato beat which encourages an audience to becomes involved in the urgency of the images. The four beats striking fairly evenly on each line and the 'aabb' rhyme scheme allows ease and speed of reading aswell as directing concentration of the reader onto image rather than form.
"The Tyger" is, aswell as being a strikingly visual poem, a very sonorous one. The regular beat, hard consonants and stressed first ...
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In the first stanza the alliteration of 't' and 'b', two hard consonants, enhances the sense of tension. When read aloud the alliteration encourages rapid reading and an staccato beat which encourages an audience to becomes involved in the urgency of the images. The four beats striking fairly evenly on each line and the 'aabb' rhyme scheme allows ease and speed of reading aswell as directing concentration of the reader onto image rather than form.
"The Tyger" is, aswell as being a strikingly visual poem, a very sonorous one. The regular beat, hard consonants and stressed first syllable provides and unstoppable beat which echoes the thump of the tigers heartbeat in stanza three. The throb of the poem not only ritualistic (chant-like), but mechanistic. The (pertinent) industrial imagery (discussed below) like "furnace" and "chains" and "anvil" call forth the repetitive clanking of factory sounds which combine with the thumping "dread" heartbeat and progression of "dread feet" of stanza three. All this: metre, industrial diction, heart beat, and repeated alliterations of 't', 'b' and 'd' combine in my head to produce a very powerful audible sensation.
Blake's choice of words is highly important. The tiger itself, especially for a Victorian audience who may never have seen one in the flesh, is a beast that cannot be confronted with equanimity. It has connotations ranging from the spiritual to the satanic, the reactionary to the revolutionary (see below). The spelling of "tyger" also evoke other words like fire, anger and power.. Also the use of word like "anvil", "furnace" and "hammer", aswell as relating to a difficult creation of a powerful thing, may also refer to the rapid shift of an essentially rural capital to the industrialized London of the late 18th century. The whole poem, aswell as many other things, is a exploration into the sensitivity of language.
Another feature of the poem's diction is its questioning tone. All the stanzas are composed of questions and unlike most contemporaneous children's didactic poetry it has no ready answers and casts no judgment. It allows the reader to formulate independent opinions1 . It is an open text susceptible to numerous interpretations. This can be frustrating but is probably a key reason for its long-standing popularity and scrutiny.
The fact that Blake comes full circle in the poem and repeats the fist verse substituting the word "could" for the more sinister "dare" indicates to me that there are no easy answers to any of the questions the poem's narrator raises. Although some spectators, including Robert Graves, see its openness as a fault and consider it somehow incomplete and confused the fact that it underwent numerous redrafts and excisions by Blake suggest that everything in it, including the variations in tense, is deliberate.
The ostensibly simple, child-like diction of Songs, specifically "The Tyger" , belies the complexity of the ideas behind it.
The exact nature of these ideas is difficult to determine, after all it is often said that Blake wrote the poem in a quasi-schizophrenic interlude.
From an historicism standpoint the meaning of "The Tyger" could be related to the ferocity of revolutionary France. However as Blake was in support of the French Revolution and its tenets of "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity" I think the poem is too ambiguous to bear any direct relation to those events, especially considering the bloodshed of "The Terror" had not begun.
As the poem is present in what was apparently a children's book of instructive poetry one could see it as confirmation of the mighty power of god the Creator however, given Blake's unorthodox religious beliefs and disdain for the given order of Christian religion, this is unlikely.
I think that Songs as a whole maps out a series of progressions from a point of relative naiveté to a point of knowledge ,experience and artistry. From faith in a God, to doubt, to ultimate faith in the self. This is seen in kernel in the "introduction" to Innocence which moves from no-verbal (piped) art to the sung ("Drop thy pipe") to the written word. Like "The Tyger" it come full circle using the "hollow reed" as the conduit of the imagination. Also, like "The Tyger", it show a progression from reliance and participation in praising to acts to independence or Selfhood. (the final stanza's lines all begin "And I").
I personally think the "Tyger! Tyger!" of the final stanza means something completely different to the "Tyger! Tyger!" of the first. I feel that Blake uses the tiger as a symbol not so much of political revolution but of spiritual revolution. It is well know that Blake was religious but not in the puritanical mode of his day. I think his tiger, although created by a rational god - Urizen - has broken free of the constraints (hence "chains") such an entity has placed upon it and has - like Frankenstein's monster - become a sensuous, sentient entity in its own right.
The tiger represents the aspiration to surpass the constraints of reason ("On what wings dare he aspire?") and attain an elevated plane. In this rebellion (one which Blake as a man was also a part of) he defies the creator - Urizen. This is why I think Blake obliquely refers to Prometheus who also defied the "vengeful god", Zeus, of Greek myth: "What the hand dare seize the fire."
I think this is why Blake excised some explicatory lines in stanza three following "What dread hand? & what dread feet?". The "dread hand" is not applied to anything, it could be the hand of the creator, the tyger(sic) or Satan the original religious rebel or a symbol of something else entirely. I believe, Blake himself was uncertain of the owner of the "dread hand" . For me personally it applies to all four. Urizen as the creator of the tiger whose work and skill ("And what shoulder? And what art?") formed the tiger; Satan whose input also went into the creation ("In what furnace was thy brain"); the dread feet of rebellion whose progress is inexorable and finally the ultimately "dread feet" of the Tyger who is now something beyond the sum of its parts. No longer a mutual heaven/hell viz. "deeps or skies" collaboration it is a dread force in its own right. Possibly Blake intended the Tyger to be a symbol of visionary, unbridled humanity. created but unfettered by rationality (Urizen), perversity (Satan) or stifling 18th century morality.
Further confirmation of this interpretation comes, for me, in the penultimate stanza :
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,"
I think the star's spear and tears are lighting and rain. The storm that Blake conjures up reminds me of the one that cast the rebel Adam and Eve out of Eden. A storm that occurred because Satan used his own powers to create dissent within Adam. As a result Man broke away from both the Old Testament god and Satan, as did the tyger. However the tyger is not a mirror image of Man in his fallen state but a vision of what Man could be in his exalted state. Where the tyger provoke pitying tears and spears from the stars the "meek..and..mild" Lamb of Innocence attains blessings from god. Whereas the lamb is a child to who "Gave thee life" the tiger has broken free into a mature fiery revolutionary splendour - The Tyger is a symbol of the "Dionysiac Principle" - the hedonistic urge to be free and follow ones productive animal instincts.
This partially tallies with the popular psychoanalytic reading of the poem: the tyger is the ultimate embodiment of the Id liberated from the command of the Urizen the ultra-rational superego. The sexual implications inherent in a psychoanalytic reading - although present within the symbol, mystery, potency, and (lustful?) heat of the Tyger and within the pubertal development of childhood lamb to predatory tiger -unfortunately have no space within the 1,500 words allowed here.
G.Gulati.
October 2000
In fact Blake excised the too emotionally loaded word "cruel" from his initial draft of the poem, probably to maintain the readers objectivity. I think the intimations of the word did not fit easily with the meanings of the poem whereas "dread", "fearful" etc. were valid in their context.