##ism And Symbolism In William Blake's 'The Tyger'

The Tyger” takes a unique look into the human soul in comparison to a tiger. This poem was written for Blake’s 1794 collection entitled Songs of Experience which contained

such a terrifying beast?” and “Who is God who dares to make such a terrifying

The poem, The Tyger, contrasts innocence and experience, and good and evil. The description of the tiger in the poem is as a destructive, horrid creature. The original drawing on the poem shows a smiling, cuddly tiger which is quite the contrast to the tiger described in the poem. This picture might suggest a misunderstanding of the tiger and perhaps the fears that arouse from the poem are unjustified. This poem contrasts the tiger with a lamb which often symbolizes innocence, Jesus, and good. The tiger is perceived as evil or demonic. Blake suggest that the lamb and the tiger have the same creator and in a way states that the tiger might also have the ability to have the benign characteristics of the lamb. The tiger initially appears as a beautiful image but as the poem progresses, it explores a perfectively beautiful yet destructive symbol that represents the presence of evil in the world. In the poem, Blake writes: " What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry (4-5)." It is hard to determine if the tiger is solely evil or good.

In the poems "The Lamb" and "The Tyger," William Blake uses symbolism, tone, and rhyme to advance the theme that God can create good and bad creatures. The poem "The Lamb" was in Blake's "Songs of Innocence," which was published in 1789. "The Tyger," in his "Songs of Experience," was published in 1794. In these contrasting poems he shows symbols of what he calls "the two contrary states of the human soul" (Shilstone 1).

William Blake’s 1793 poem “The Tyger” has many interpretations, but its main purpose is to question God as a creator. Its poetic techniques generate a vivid picture that encourages the reader to see the Tyger as a horrifying and terrible being. The speaker addresses the question of whether or not the same God who made the lamb, a gentle creature, could have also formed the Tyger and all its darkness. This issue is addressed through many poetic devices including rhyme, repetition, allusion, and symbolism, all of which show up throughout the poem and are combined to create a strong image of the Tyger and a less than thorough interpretation of its maker.

In the poem “The Tyger” by William Blake, the use of rhyme, repetition, allusion, and symbolism all help the reader understand the theme and what was going through the authors thoughts while writing. William Blake was a mystic poet who channeled his thoughts and questions to write poems. He questioned the creator of both the Tyger and lamb, how could the same God create a destructive creature like the Tyger and on the other hand create a gentle animal, the lamb. This ties into the theme of the poem of how a God could and would create a monster like the Tyger.

Blake begins the poem by stating that it is not possible to love another as much as yourself, and that thought is the highest of all human functions. This sets the stage for Blake's attack on religion's ideas of hierarchy and condemnation of rational thought. The next stanza describes the boy asking God, indicated by the capitalized "Father," how he could love him or another human more than a little bird picking up crumbs. The boy states that he loves God in and as much as a little bird. This echoes the naturalist ideas supported in the aforementioned poems. Blake seems to be saying that the proper way to worship and commune with God is by loving all natural beings, human and non-human. The priest, a symbol of organized religion that Blake so sharply critiques, overhears what the boy is saying and is infuriated by the idea that a person could worship God through nature, without ritual, politics, or human involvement, and that the boy dares use his mind to question what he has been taught. The priest makes the boy a martyr, preaching from his high pedestal of pomposity, and burns the boy, despite the cries of his family. The boy's curiosity and natural thinking have been squelched, and his imagination bound in iron chains. Blake closes the poem by asking if such

William Blake’s poetry is considered through the Romantics era and they access through the sublime. The Romantics poetry through the sublime is beyond comprehension and spiritual fullness. A major common theme is a nature (agnostic religion). In William Blake’s poem “The Tyger” he describes the tiger as a creature that was created by a higher power some time before. In Blake’s poem he questions, “What immortal hand or eye/ Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” (Blake 22-23). He describes the tiger as a form of symmetry that can be seen as evil, yet have intriguing features such as those that make the tiger a beautiful creation. Blake also questions if that the higher being who created the tiger also created all else around the world such as a human being. Blake shifts his first stanzas from the tiger to the creator. Not only is he questioning who created the tiger, but he is also describing the beauty and evil of the world. The beauty that the Romantics believe in is nature and one evil seen through the world is materialism that distract humans from the beauty of nature 's gifts. He believes that people lose touch with spirituality when haven’t given to nature. Blake also illustrated his own works through

William Blake’s The Tyger and The Lamb are both very short poems in which the author poses rhetorical questions to what, at a first glance, would appear to be a lamba lamb and a tiger. In both poems he uses vivid imagery to create specific connotations and both poems contain obvious religious allegory. The contrast between the two poems is much easier to immediately realize . “The lamb” was published in a Blake anthology entitled “The songs of experience” which depicted life in a much more realistic and painful light. Both poems share a common AABB rhyme scheme and they are both in regular meter. In “The Tyger” Blake paints a picture of a powerful creature with eyes of fire and dread hands and feet. He asks rhetorical questions with a respectful awe that is almost fearful and makes the setting more foreign to the reader by including imagery like “the forest of the night” By contrast. Blake’s portrait of the lamb is one of innocence and child like wonderment “The Tyger is almost an examination of the horrors in the world while “The lamb examines only that which is “bright,”tender, “mild”. The use of words like “night,” “burning’ and “terrors in the tyger”create quite a contrary image for the reader than that of “The lamb.”

Blake uses traditional symbols of angels and devils, animal imagery, and especially images of fire and flame to: 1) set up a dual world, a confrontation of opposites or "contraries" which illustrate how the rules of Reason and Religion repress and pervert the basic creative energy of humanity, 2) argues for apocalyptic transformation of the self "through the radical regeneration of each person's own power to imagine" (Johnson/Grant, xxiv), and 3) reconstructs Man in a new image, a fully realized Man who is both rational and imaginative, partaking of his divinity through creativity. The form of the poem consists of "The Argument," expositions on his concepts of the "contraries" and of "expanded perception" which are both interspersed with "Memorable Fancies" that explicate and enlarge on his expositions, and concludes with "A Song of Liberty," a prophecy of a future heaven on earth.

The archetype of this poem focuses on how aggressive and vicious the tiger is. It also can be seen as a more physical comparison such as, “Tyger Tyger, burning bright,” (line 1, page 749). Blake says the tiger is burning bright, but does not mean this literally, for he is comparing the color of the tiger to the color of fire. Blake does insult God for creating the creature because all it does is kill and destroy. The tiger also has more power. In which, the Songs of Experience poems are related to those that are leaders, fighters, and that are more outspoken; therefore, The Tyger fits more perfectly with that collection of

William Blake used animals as basic building blocks for poems such as “The Lamb” and “The Tyger.” By using these carefully selected animals to depict good and evil, the reader truly understands Blake’s words. All readers can relate to animals such as an innocent lamb and a

Blake not only talks of fire and evil when referring to the tiger, but of art and beauty as well; “what

William Blake was known to be a mystic poet who was curious about the unknowns in the world, and strived to find all the answers. Does God create both gentle and fearful creatures? As a questioned asked in the poem “The Tyger” William Blake pondered on why an all-powerful, loving God would create a vicious predator, the Tiger, after he created a sweet, timid, harmless animal, the lamb. The theme of this poem surrounds this idea of why the same creator would create both a destructive and gentle animal. This issue is brought up and discussed through rhyme, repetition, allusion, and symbolism.

William Blake depicted the tyger as the malevolent beast, to make the reader apprehend the beauty of God’s creation. “And what shoulder, and what art, could twist the sinews of thy heart?”(Blake 9-10).The tiger is mighty and innovative to fight off negative energy, such as ignorance. The heart being twisted represents how people are corrupted in their own