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“The Tyger,” by Romantic poet, William Blake, is one of the best-known poems in the English language and was written as the counterpart to Blake’s earlier poem, “The Lamb.” “The Tyger” consists of a series of questions, wondering how the same Christian God could create both the tender, innocent lamb and the fearsome powerful tiger.
The poem opens with a direct address to the tiger, the famous lines:
“Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
The regularity of the trochaic meter (a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable) and an AABB rhyme scheme themselves enact the “symmetry” that Blake’s speaker identifies in the tiger.
The second through fourth stanzas imply the origin of the tiger is as much mythical or technological as it is divine. The images of the “hammer” (13), “chain” (13), “furnace” (14), and “anvil” suggest that the tiger was forged by a blacksmith. By placing the tiger’s creation in a smithy, Blake implies that it is a technological achievement. The repetition of the word “dread” to describe the blacksmith’s extremities and the grasp of his tools makes this achievement a fearsome one. The images also reinforce the earlier references to both hell and mythology, as they recall the fires of the Christian underworld and the domain of Vulcan, the Roman god of the forge.
The imagery also exemplifies Blake’s interest in contrasting the natural world with the industrialization of London in the late 1700’s. The means of creating the tiger is mechanical rather than natural; here, technological “progress” brings to life a fierce, deadly predator.
The fifth stanza shifts abruptly away from both the tiger and its creator to what many critics interpret as an allusion to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. “When the stars threw down their spears / And water’d heaven with their tears” recalls the fall of the rebellious angels who dropped their weapons in surrender before God’s might in Milton’s epic.
The stanza closes with perhaps the most significant question the speaker poses to the tiger: “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” Blake thus leaves a degree of ambiguity in the matter of the tiger’s creation, obligating his readers to decide whether two such contrasting creatures can stem from the same source.
The poem ends as it began, with the final stanza nearly repeating the first. The final stanza, though, transforms the question at the beginning of the poem into “What immortal hand or eye, / Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” The change upends the symmetry between the opening and closing stanzas of the poem, suggesting the complexity of a creator who “dares” to create such contrasting realities.
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