In ‘The Lamb’ questions are asked in the first verse. ‘Dost thou know who made thee?’ is asked and the answer is provided in the second verse; the verse starts ‘I’ll tell thee’. Of course the answer was that God made the lamb. These are the questions of a child and of course the answer is obvious before reading the second verse. The poem is likening Jesus Christ to the lamb and suggesting it is understandable that God made the lamb because ‘He calls himself a lamb’.
The Tiger, however, is of course an entirely different animal. In ‘The Tyger’ no answers are provided to the questions. ‘What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?’ is asked. No answer is provided but the images suggested are more hellish, the words ‘hammer’, ‘furnace’ and ‘anvil’ being used. In essence the poet is asking the question, through putting the two poems together, can the God who made the lamb also have made the tiger? How can a God who is ‘meek’ and ‘mild’ create something such as the tiger? It makes us then question our previous assumption that God made the lamb.
Contrast is employed in the two poems to point out opposites. The poem ‘The Lamb’ is slightly sickly in its imagery and phrases like ‘softest clothing, woolly, bright’ are child-like and innocent. This contrasts with the description of the tiger in imagery like the ‘fire of thine eyes’. This helps to make a definite contrast between them. The poems compare the features of the lamb and the tiger using different imagery.
One of the interesting techniques used in both poems is repetition to create a dramatic effect. In ‘The Lamb’ the words ‘little lamb’ are repeated at the start of both verses. ‘Little lamb, who made thee?’ is echoed at the start of the second verse, ‘Little lamb I’ll tell thee’. Also in ‘The Tiger’ the lines ‘What immortal hand or eye could frame they fearful symmetry’ are repeated at the end of the poem, however the ‘could’ is replaced with ‘dare’ to add extra drama.
The poem ‘The Tiger’ is wondering what entity so great and terrible ‘could’ create the tiger and would ‘dare’ to create the tiger. The question is asked ‘what art could twist the sinews of thy heart?’. The Tiger in the poem is portrayed as so terrible that to create it would require something even greater and more terrifying. ‘What hand dare seize the fire’ of the tiger?
In the end there are two ways in which we might view these poems as a pair. Did the poet intend us to marvel at the beauty of nature, at the sheer variety of life and wonder that two things so different could be created by the same entity? Are we meant to marvel that it could create something as fierce as the tiger and as meek as the lamb. Paradoxically are we to draw from it that these two creatures the lamb and the tiger are so different that they could not possibly have been created by the same immortal hand and so a belief in God should be questioned?