William Blake - The Tyger

So, for those of you who know me personally, it will come as no surprise when I tell you that I tend to hate poetry. (... Alright, maybe hate is a word that's too strong in this context, but I really dislike it.) This is because I find it obscure and the way you should read it just doesn't match up with the way I like to read: which is turning pages the fastest way possible and getting on with the story. With poetry, however, you're supposed to read the poem more than once in order to appreciate the sound of it and also to think a while about the way the words are arranged to discover their meaning. I have to admit, I'm just not patient enough for all that ...

However, as with every rule, there is one exception to it, which has actually made me reconsider my opinion of poetry a bit. I know, I know. I'm not quite over the shock myself ...

What is this poem of magic? It's William Blake's The Tyger. I really love it: I love the alliteration, the topic (a tiger - yay!), the metaphors, the descriptions, the rhymes ... it's lovely! But before I get more deeply into all that, here's the poem, first of all:

The Tyger

Tyger Tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

I'll let you take a deep breath and calm down after all this excitement, before I move on ...

...

All set? Alright, so the first thing that I really love about it are the images that it creates in my mind when I read it: the orange fur of the tiger that "burns" in the dark forests of the night - it's like a warm torch burning in the darkness. And then there's the contrast between the innocence of the lamb and all this war-related vocabulary that is used in connection with the tiger: "the hammer", "the chain", "the spears", etc. I think it captures the fear that we all would feel when faced with a tiger perfectly - they are amazing predators after all.

If you're interested in finding out more about the poem (structure, symbols, meaning, etc.), I really recommend looking through the analysis that the good people of shmoop.com and sparknotes.com have put together. You can find those here and here. I'm just going to mention a few of the things that I found most interesting about it!

The repetition of the word "Tyger"

It sounds a bit like an enchantment, doesn't it? In terms of structure, it reminds me a bit of the famous witches' enchantment in Macbeth, since you've got repetition as well as alliteration there as well:

Double, double toil and trouble,

Fire burn and cauldron bubble

Of course, nowadays we all know those lines from the Harry Potter films, don't we? ;)

Anyway, to get back on topic: the reason why I find this to be relevant for the poem is that Blake seems to cast the tiger as a very mysterious animal in it. It doesn't even seem like much of an animal, but rather like something straight out of everybody's worst nightmare: you know, with the sinews of the heart, the brain that was made in a furnace, etc. So, to make the beginning of the poem sound like an enchantment just adds to the eerie atmosphere of it, I think. It's a genius move on Blake's part.

On the other hand, the repetition could also be a representation of the speaker thinking aloud. Like nowadays too, you know that whenever people are contemplating something aloud or they've lost something, they tend to repeat the thing they're thinking about to themselves, as in: "Keys, keys, where are my keys?" So, when the speaker is repeating the word to himslef, he's in effect saying: "Tiger, tiger - well, what the heck are you?"

What's up with the "fearful symmetry"? And why is it "framed"?

I think the symmetry that is meant here is probably the tiger's stripes. They're pretty symmetrical, aren't they? Let's have a look ...

Awww ...

Well, almost symmetrical at least ...

As for why this is the only word that breaks up the the rhyme scheme of this poem, I've come up with two explanations:

1) The modern pronunciation of the word is different from the one of William Blake's time, which means that it should really be symmetry as in "try", rather than symmetry as in "tree". Boring, but probably the more likely explanation.

2) It's no coincidence that there is a break in the rhyme scheme at the end of the first stanza. The speaker has discovered something that's out of sorts with his world, namely that there is something as dreadful as the tiger, and he experiences this as jarring: that's why he fails to come up with a rhyme. 

Personally, I like the second explanation better, even if it is the more unlikely one. Plus, I think it's funny that the the only word that goes against the poem's symmetry in terms of rhyme scheme is the word symmetry itself - talk about irony.

Regarding the word "framed", the people of shmoop have pointed out that the meaning is probably close to "to contain" - as in, "Who could have framed/contained the tiger with all its deadly attributes in this shape?". So what the speaker seems to be really asking is, "Who put the tiger in the tiger?" :P

The significance of "fire"

Fire plays a very important and prominent role in this poem: it's in the tiger's fur ("burning bright"), its eyes ("burnt the fire of thine eyes"), and even its brain ("in what furnace was thy brain"). This is interesting when one considers the symbolic meaning of fire, which on the one hand relates to power and destruction, but on the other hand also life and sacredness (particularly, if you think about the holy spirit, which came down on Jesus disciples at Pentecost in the shape of tongues of fire). 

In one word only, we've got the essence of the poem here, then, which is the wonder that the speaker expresses at God and his creation, being astounded by both its beauty and its frightfulness. But more on this in the next section.

The switch from "could" to "dare"

The most observant of you will probably have noticed this on your first read through the poem (I didn't till my third or fourth go), but the first and the last stanza are actually not exact copies of each other. There is a one word difference, and that's the switch from "What immortal hand or eye / could frame thy fearful symmetry" to "What immortal hand or eye / dare frame thy fearful symmetry". It seems that while in the beginning of the poem the speaker is questioning the ability as well as identity of someone to create something as fearful as the tiger, at the end he's more concerned with the morality of the decision: Who would even dare to create a killing machine such as the tiger? (We'll leave the issue that that's not really a fair or very real representation of the tiger aside for the moment ...)

It really drives the whole point about the speaker's doubts about a benevolent God in the face of all the inherent cruelty in creation home. After all, if you believe in God, the question of who put all the creatures on earth is not really a difficult one. The part where it gets thorny is the why question. Why are we here? And why is there so much suffering in the world, when God is supposed to love us?

*coughs*

Alright, I'm done philosophising, you can all wake up again ...

Let's move on to more fun stuff!

Goodies

Unsurprisingly, I'm not the only one who really likes this poem, and there's tons of good stuff in relation to The Tyger on the web. Here's a little selection of the stuff that I have found:

Readings

There are a number of good readings of the poem on youtube, but this is the best one in my opinion. It's rather eerie to listen to, which fits the atmosphere of the poem perfectly. I really got goose-bumps on my arms when I listened to it the first time!

There is another "reading" of sorts, which I really like - only it's not a reading, really, but rather a singing! Somebody on youtube has been kind enough to compose some music to accompany the text of this poem and turn the whole thing into a song:

I like this, because I think it catches the rhythm of the poem really well!

Illustrations

Another thing that you can find on the internet are the coloured illustrations (drawn by William Blake himself, I believe) that accompany the original manuscript. I'll show you two of the ones I like best, but, if you feel like it. you can have a look at more of them at the William Blake Archive.

The first of these two is taken from the copy T of the British Musuem, while the second one can be found in the copy AA owned by the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England. 

Mamma mia, this post is getting long again - I think I'll let it go at this point! I suppose this is what happens when I love something excessively. Thank God I didn't keep a blog when I was reading Harry Potter ...

References, Sources, Links & the Like

Macbeth (text): http://nfs.sparknotes.com/macbeth/page_132.html

The Tyger (analysis - shmoop): http://www.shmoop.com/tyger/

The Tyger (analysis - sparknotes): http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/blake/section6.rhtml

The Tyger (text): http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172943

Tiger (picture): http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Big_Tiger_Cub.jpg

William Blake Archive (images): http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/work.xq?workid=songsie&java=no

YouTube videos:

Harry Potter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2xfpoQx6oI
Reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMwNvzRKX64
Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFexFkJwrAo