'A Comparative Analysis Of Blake's Poetry.' - 'The Tiger' and 'The Lamb'.
‘A Comparative Analysis Of Blake’s Poetry.’ Natalie Davidson 11ZA3
‘The Tiger’ and ‘The Lamb’
William Blake wrote two interlocking poems, ‘The Tiger’ and ‘The Lamb’, which are both obviously referring to animals, but it is the different approaches to form, style and language choice that are used to different effect.
Blake uses ‘The Tiger’ as a vehicle to represent all of his ideologies of fear at the time. As with all animals such as a tiger, it is the natural instinct of every man to fear and instinctively desire to harm them, which is shown through words such as ‘dread’ ‘’deadly’ and ‘spears’. In this poem, the word ‘stars’ is used to symbolise, in Blake’s eyes, what a tiger represents at first glance. In Blake’s time, people saw the stars as a symbol of everything that oppressed human beings and removed their freedom, especially as an image of war and human aggression. This also represents the impact of the tiger’s creation on society, where ‘He’ smiles in satisfaction at what he has made, when in fact it’s appalling strength even caused the stars to abandon their armament. The tiger therefore represents all evil there is that exists in the world, but this is seen a s acceptable because without evil, there is nothing with which to compare good and consequently there can be no existence of good, such as the lamb. ‘The Lamb’ is therefore in complete contrast and represents all that is good in the world. The word ‘lamb’ connotates images of innocence and wholeness and is for this reason, compared to a child, which implies sweetness and goodness. The poems are a contemplation of the fact that besides peacefulness and gentleness, as shown in ‘The Lamb’, the world includes fierce strength, terrifying in its possibilities of destructiveness, like ‘The Tiger’. To see that the tigers fierceness and the lambs gentleness are also contrasting qualities of the human mind is a very slight extension beyond the simplest literal sense.
