THE TYGER , William Blake questions answers

 THE TYGER 

William Blake

A SHORT BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH:

He was an 'English poet, painter, and engraver (1757-1827)'. Although unworldly and always poor, Blake enjoyed the good fortune of living a happy life. A shopkeeper's son, he was largely self-educated, but his talent was recognized early, and he was apprenticed to an engraver. The most famous of his engravings by which he earned his living were his book illustrations, especially those for Blair's The Grave, Dante's Divine Comedy, and The Book of Job.

Blake abhorred the rationalism and materialism of his times. What he saw and painted were human beings beset with evil, yet striving for the divine within them: 'For Mercy has a human heart,/ Pity a human face, /And Love, the human form divine.' He saw and painted the Godhead peering in at his window and angels sitting beside him in the garden, in the shadows of trees, resting among leaves and flowers.

Blake's poetry was published in a manner most unusual in literary and art history; he personally manufactured every copy. The verses were not typeset but were, with the engravings that illustrated them, cut into copper plates. The pages themselves he illuminated in water colours. Little valued by his contemporaries, Blake's illustrations have become prized collectors' items.

Both in his engravings and in his poems, the purpose of Blake's art was primarily moral. By showing men his vision of the possibility of true freedom of the spirit, he hoped to free them from the shackles of convention and tradition, to help them realize their potentialities by trusting their intuition (The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction'). His vision was also social and political. He believed in man's dignity and natural right to liberty ('A tyrant is the worst disease. and the cause of all others'). But the mystical tone and the symbols, the revolutionary attitudes in theme and imagery, the impatience with codified ethics, the completely new kind of art which sought not outward but inne

reality, all went to convince his own generation that he was a lunatic. Blake, who was far more revolutionary in subject-matter, diction, and technique than Burns or Wordsworth, was not appreciated until the mid- nineteenth century. Indeed, the mystic rhapsodies of his later Prophetic Books are so much a secret poems are still bewildering despite a century of commentators.

The most familiar of Blake's lyrics appeared in Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794). In such poems as The Lamb and The Little Black Boy from the first, and The Tyger and The Chimney- Sweeper from the second, adult wisdom and poetic intuition are brilliantly intensified by being voiced with the charming artlessness of a child. Unlike the later poems, there are vivid and direct, their symbolism readily understood. These two volumes, together with Poetical Sketches (1783) and the Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), show Blake at his lyric best.

INTRODUCTION TO THE TYGER:

The poem is included in Blake's Songs of Experience. In 1789. William Blake issued his Songs of Innocence. In 1794 he reissued it in the same manner, but with the addition of Songs of Experience to form a single book. 'At simplest reading the poem is contemplation of the fact that, besides peacefulness and gentleness, the world includes fierce strength terrifying in its possibilities of destructiveness but also impressive and admirable, a stupendous part of creation, and seemingly a challenge to the idea of a benign Creator. To see that the tiger's fierceness and the Lamb's gentleness are also contrasting qualities of the human mind is a very slight extension beyond the simplest literal sense. The theme is a commonplace, and also a fact of supreme human importance, the focus of sharp psychological conflict in individual minds and of unending theological and philosophical discussion. What Blake's fine poem co s is to let us contemplate the facts in their emotional intensity and conflict and to share his complex attitude of awe, terror, admiration, near-bafflement

and attempted acceptance. The poem attests the poet's profound faith in cosmic forces. The images of 'The Tyger' which occurs also in the prophetic books are independent in their own strength and freedom and are so compelling that for most purposes they explain themselves.

*THE TYGER

Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright 

In the forests of the night,

 What immortal hand or eye

 Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies 

Burnt the fire of thine eyes? 

On what wings dare he aspire? 

What the hand dare seize the fire?

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 that 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 immortál hand or eye

 Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

* The most impressive- and by far the most well-known-poem is The Tyger (Blake's spelling is worth retaining, for it seems to emphasize the symbolic quality of the animal).

The power and intensity of this short poem, achieved both by the imagery and by the way the beat of the line is handled at each point, are over-whelming, and again there is an immediate poetic meaning communicated even to those who cannot refer each image to its symbolic context. There is both beauty and terroging the elemental forces of nature."-David Daichar

ANNOTATIONS ON THE TEXT

Gist: Seeing the strong, relentless and beautiful tiger lurking in the nocturnal forests, the poet wonders what immortal hand or eye framed the tyger's body, dreadful yet well-proportioned. The poet further enquires in what volcanoes beneath or skies above the Creator soared to obtain the fire needed for the tiger's eyes and whose hands dared to seize that dangerous fire.

(Stanza I and II)

Tyger-the tiger is Blake's symbol for the fierce forces in the soul which are essential to break the bonds of experience.

Burning bright-this refers to the two burning eyes of the tiger as seen in darkness of the night, but also signifies its passion and energy which make the tiger an awesome object. 'The description 'burning bright......... has important uncertainties of meaning: we may (in view of the second stanza) think primarily of the two burning eyes in the darkness, but the phrase itself makes the whole tiger a symbol of a 'burning' quality-wrath, passion, ardour perhaps; again the word 'bright' modifies the kind of burning suggested: it may convey incandescence, white heat, and it brings a sense of light, something glorious and shining in the quality symbolized'.

Forests of night-nocturnal forests, forests at night. The 'forests of the night' in which the tiger lurks stand for ignorance, repression and superstition. It may be mentioned in this connection that night and forests are both oppression symbols. Blake's symbolic system is as follows:

Innocent symbols:Children, sheep, wild birds, wild flowers, green fields, dawns, dew, spring, shepherds, valleys,  hills, etc.

Energy symbols: Lions, tigers, wolves, eagles, noon, summer, sun, fire, swords, spears, etc. These further overlap into:

THE TYGER

Sexual symbols: Dreams, branches of trees, roses, gold, silver. moonlight, etc., and associated images like-nets, cages, fairies.

These overlap into-

Corruption symbols: Looms, curtains, cities, houses, snakes, evening, silence, disease. These further overlap :

Oppression symbols: Priests, mills, forests, mountains, seas, caves, clouds, thunder, frost, night, stars, winter, stone, iron.

What immortal..............symmetry?-the poet wonders to think who designed the dreadful yet well-proportioned shape and body of the tiger... Eye-The Creator's idea of the tiger before ever it was fashioned. Symmetry-perfectly-proportioned from, shape. (II. 3-4) Deeps-perhaps volcanoes rather than oceans are meant here. (I. 5) On what wings- Blake's fine colour-print known as 'The Elohim Creating Adam depicts the Creator as a majestic human figure hovering in the air immediately above the newly created Adam (l. 7). Seize the fire-Presumably refers to the legends of Prometheus who stole fire from heaven for the use of mankind.

(Stanzas I and II)

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Gist: The poet wonders at the courage, strength and skill of the Creator who fashioned the tiger. He asks what effort and what skill were required to form the muscles of the tiger's heart. The Creator required the hammer, the chain, the furnace, the anvil to create the tiger.

(Stanzas III & IV)

Sinews-muscles (1. 10). What dread............feet?-the act of the creation of God is certainly a piece of manual labour on the part of the Creator. (I. 12) N. B. this line was originally followed by another, to form the couplet:

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

Could fetch it from the furnace deep?

This second line, and several following it, Blake cancelled, leaving

us with four staccata to phrases (II. 12-13), like hammer strokes.

The Chain-this has a deeper metaphorical meaning. It is one of those fettering images which occur time and again in the Songs of Experience. The question implies that no one can chain the tiger. (1. 13)

WILLIAM BLAKE

Anvil the block of iron on which the blacksmith works metal. (1. 15) Dread grasp-territic hold. (l. 15) (Stanzas III & M)

Gist: 'Blake asks, with scarcely believing awe, whether the Creator smiled with satisfaction in what he had made when, in fact, its ferocious strength was so appalling that even the stars abandoned their armed formidability (ie. the spears suggests by their steely glitter) and broke down in tears'. The poet is amazed to see that the same Creator should have created both the lamb and the tiger.

When the stars threw down their spears-This line has produced many interpretations. It occurs in The Four Zoas in which Urizen says: "I went no forth: I hid myself in black clouds of my wrath:

I call'd the stars around my feet in the night of councils of dark The stars threw down their spears and fled naked away."

Note: The angels wonder how even God did dare to create such a beast. T. S. Eliot wrote in his Gerontion: 'In the juvescene of the year/Came Christ the tiger (II. 19-20). T. S. Eliot might have thought of this poem, for the Tiger stands for the 'abundant life' which Christ came to bring into the world. The tiger symbolizes regeneration and energy, the stars here being Urizen (Satan) and his associates. Blake's use of the stars symbolizing the Angels seem to be Biblical. After the Angels, weeping with distress, had acknowledged their defeat at Christ's hands, God created this world, including the animals.

Gardner interprets the line in the way that the stars symbolizing material power, cast aside the instruments of strife and take on pity; and the Creator, now become the God of Innocence, 'smiles upon the triumph of the lamb'. He goes on to explain that the stanza of the Lamb is the only one in which not only the tiger of wrath and rebellion is brought to harmony, but the universe of stars and night as theme is the Incarnation. The stars symbolize 'the hard cold realm of Reason and War, that held the earth before Compassion came with Christ'. The tiger to him is 'nothing less indeed the Divine spark, the fiercely struggling individuality'. He concludes saying, 'And yet when we ask ourselves, if it is good to be alive and to burn with quenchless desire, with love half-realized and

THE TYGER

with purpose ever imperfectly fulfilled, the incarnate heart of Deity in ourselves responds, with the smile of daybreak, that the spirits which discem and divide and contend in labour and agony, are but glimpses of the Great Light that shall unite and heal in strength and tenderness and joy 'This kind of writing as comment on Blake is objected to first on the ground that, it imports into the poem intellectual meanings that are too remotely and indirectly derived from the words. if they can claim to derive from them at all, and second that the parish-magazine quality of sentiment it expresses is totally foreign to the tautness and strength of the state of mind Blake invites us to share'. (l. 17)

Did he who made the Lamb make thee-The poet is amazed to see that the same Creator created both the lamb and the tiger. The 'lamb' symbolizes the gentleness and the 'tiger' fierceness. "The lamb and the tiger are symbols for two different states of the human soul. When the lamb is destroyed by experience, the tiger is needed to restore the world." It is a proof of the Creator's greatness that Christ can be symbolized both by the fiercest and the meekest of the quadrupeds'. (1. 20)

Comment: Did he smile...........thee? (l. 19-20)

This puts the question directly, asking whether the Creator of the lamb was also the Creator of the Tiger and if so was he pleased with his creation? It calls for a Yes or No answer, as the 'What' questions that make up the rest of the poem do not. The questions used to be translated into conventional religious terms as the ancient questions, 'Could god create both good and evil?' The question, 'Did he smile his work to see,' makes such a translation not quite to the point. In any event, the answers that might be suggested-and few commentators would go much further than suggesting an answer-depend largely on who the Creator is. If the Creator is not God but the demiurge, as Miss Kathleen Raine suggests, approaching the poem through possible sources in Jacob Bohme and the Hermetica and glossing it from parallel imagery in Urizen's account of his fall in The Four Zoas, the answer to the first question would be No but the answer to the second would be Yes, followed by remove. But Miss Raine is a subtle reader of the poem, and, while it is for her 'the presentation of the problem of evil as he (Blake) found it in the Hermetic

WILLIAM BLAKE

and Gnostic tradition,' she feels that the questions remain unanswered because the answer would be 'a no or yes of such depth and complexity', and not because Blake had no answer.

A mere Yes or No would leave the issue unsettled, and I would agree that the questions remain essentially unanswered, but for different reasons. It 'The Tyger is considered in the context of Blake's work alone, it seems to me that he could be regarded as a providential creation for-not of or by-the fallen world of Experience. If we take the stars in this crucial stanza as having a meaning near to that which they had in works closely contemporary with the poem as symbolizing oppression, also take their throwing down their spears in this context as indicating some kind of defeat, then the answers to both questions are probably. Yes-but a Yes of such deep ambivalence in the context of the genuine fearfulness of the beast as to leave the questions without definitive answers.

EXPLANATIONS:

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand dare seize the fire?

In these lines from Blake's The Tyger, the poet, being much impressed by the stupendous creation of the tiger, throws a volley of questions 'which pierce to the heart of life'.

The speaker wonders, seeing the glare in the tiger's eyes, and asks if the Creator of the beast soared up to the distant skies or descended to the volcanic depths to obtain the fire needful for the tiger's eyes. The speaker further asks whose hands dared to catch hold of that fire to put it into the eyes of the tiger.

Notes: On what wings-Blake's fine colour-print known as The Elohim creating Adam depicts the Creator as a majestic winged human figure hovering in the air immediately above the newly created Adam.

Seize the fire-a reminiscence presumably of the Prometheus legend. Deeps or skies-The spaces of primal, unformed creations-in Genesis 12 'darkness was upon the face of the deep' over which the spirit moved:

THE TYGER

and soon the deep was divided into heaven above and deep beneath." Deeps-perhaps suggest volcanoes rather than oceans.

2.

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?     (11.17-20)

This is a stanza which has produced many interpretations Blake's use of the stars to symbolize the angels is Biblical. After the rebel angels led by Lucifer, with tears of despair and distress, had acknowledged their defeat at Christ's hand, God created our world including the animals-among them the tiger. The poet now asks if the Creator smiled with satisfaction to see the tiger who had been created. 'If the Creator smiled to see his work, it cannot be known why. Perhaps it was because the tiger, a ferociously predatory animal, satisfied his cruel nature; perhaps because in His great wisdom. He saw a place for the tiger in the scheme of things. The speaker does not even know whether the same power created both the tiger and the lamb. The tiger's Creator is not only a God of wrath, the creator of Satan and the French and Ameican Revolution, but also a God of mercy. the Creator of the tiger's 'contrary', the lamb of innocence. It is a proof of His greatness that he created Christ to symbolize both the fiercest, and the meekest of the quadrupeds. In the context of Innocence and Experience, the tiger can be seen as an image of cosmic wrath and energy that is needed to destroy some of the elements of experience, though not the state itself, when they threaten the existence of the state symbolized by the lamb. All through the songs innocence has been associated with light, but gentle light. The light of the tiger is fiery as he burns in 'the forests of the night'.

Comment: Another interpretation of the stanza is this: 'Even the stars, first of all the created things, were struck with grief and terror when they first viewed this new creature. They "watered heaven with their tears" and, unable to understand the creator's purpose, "threw down their spears in astonishment and despair."

One more interpretation follows: To Gardner, the stars, the symbols

WILLIAM BLAKE

of material power, cast aside the instruments of strife and take on pity- and the Creator who has now become the God of Innocence, 'smiles upon the triumph of the lamb. Gardner further says, 'The stanza of the Lamb is the only in which not only the tyger of wrath and rebellion is brought to harmony, but the universe of stars and night as well. The tyger lies down with the Lamb'.

CRITICAL QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

1. Attempt the critical estimate of Blake's The Tyger.

 Ans. The Tyger is the most impressive and the most striking of the poems included in the series Songs of Experience. The theme of the poem is a simple one but its apparent simplicity simply intensifies its visionary quality. The tiger is a part of the creation. The beauty and ferocity of the beast overwhelms the poet. The shock experienced forces the poet to look further than this familiar world-to the "distant deeps or skies'. The speaker wonders at the dreadful and yet will-proportioned shape and figure of the beast and asks who could have been the designer. The poet asks what manner, devices and instruments the Creator could have employed to bring about such a wonder. The poet further wonders whether the Creator was pleased at what He created. But the poem has some greater truths to reveal. In this connection D. W. Harding says, "At simplest reading the poem is a contemplation of the fact that, besides peacefulness and gentleness, the world includes fierce strength terrifying in its possibilities of destructiveness but also impressive and admirable, a stupendous part of creation and seemingly a challenge to the idea of being

The poem has a supreme human importance focusing on a sharp psychological conflict in individual minds. The mind of the speaker is forced to explore a realm where his senses cannot assist him. As the beast takes shape, the tension in the mind of the speaker runs high. The speaker throws a volley of questions in a breathless grasp of wonder until the process is complete. The questions often break in mid-sentences. The poet is placed in further psychological

THE TYGER

dichotomy. He has his questions but he cannot hope for any answer

and cannot know, even, if his questions are relevant ones. The Tyger is a classic poem in its use of imagery and symbolism.

The images here have their special strength and freedom. The poem opens with a vivid dramatic visual effect as the tiger almost leaps out at us from the page-

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

 In the forests of the night:"

But there is in the alliterative first line a creation of sound the effect of which is seen in the metallic and clanging imagery of the hammer, the chain, and the anvil:

'What the hammer? What the chain?

What that anvil?.............te of

Our attention is always drawn to the sound as well as the sight

imagery in the poem. This is the sound imagery which provides

one of the contrasts between Songs of Innocence and Songs of

Experience. The physical, tangible and tactile quality is suggested in

the final line of the first stanza: "Could frame thy fearful symmetry?'

The shape, from and physical movement of the beast have been

caught in the phrase, 'fearful symmetry' and the idea of physical

immediacy is conveyed in the line "What the hand, dare seize

the fire?" Blake's imagery has its shifts and changes from single

dimension of either sound or sight when later in the poem a picture

of the physical extensions of the Creator at work wrestling with his

stupendous creation is conjured up:

"And what shoulder, & what art,

 Could twist the sinews of thy heart?'

But the image in the poem gains added significance and magnitude when it moves into the arena of symbolism. Blake's spelling of Tyger is worth nothing 'for it seems to emphasize the symbolic quality of the animal'. The tiger symbolies the fierce forces in the soul, which are needed to break the bonds of experience. For some the tiger with its 'fearful symmetry' stands for the pervasive

WILLIAM BLAKE

evil in the world; for others, the tiger symbolizes an awful beauty in creation; and for still others the tiger is a symbol of praise for the creation of the universe. The 'forests of the night' in which the tiger lurks represent ignorance, repression, and superstition. To some, the forest is 'the world of Experience, where the many sterile errors (dead trees) conceal the path and dim the light'. The fire is a symbol of wrath. To Spenser wrath is a fire. Milton wrote of flames as the sign of wrath awaked. Blake's association of fire with his tiger is found in the lines 1, 6, and 8.

Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

What the hand dare seize the fire

The stars too in the poem stand as symbols. To Gardner the stars symbolize the material powers.

The poem may be interpreted as an allegory reflecting the opposing powers of God and Satan of god and evil. Both Lamb and Tyger are visibly the parts of Good's creation. God created the tiger, the aggressor and the lamb, the prey. The co-existence of fierceness represented by the tiger and the gentleness represented by the lamb is a mystery, a mystery of contrariness. The fierce strength terrifying in its possibilities of destructiveness in seemingly an open challenge to the idea of a benign Creator.

The last but one stanza is intrinsic to the allegorical effect:

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?"

The 'stars' are the rebel angels and the tiger is related with Satan. God created Satan who challenged Him for supremacy. Satan's lures and temptations were 'shining bright and the angels joined in an act of rebellion. Blake was familiar with the account of rebellion in the Bible.

Blake's The Tyger may be regarded as the pure poetry of Blake's trust in cosmic forces. The power and intensity of this

THE TYGER

short poem, achieved both by the imagery and by the way the beat of the line us handled at each point, are overwhelming, and again there is an immediate poetic meaning communicated even to those who cannot refer each image to its symbolic context. Here Blake's personifications are bold, thoughts original and style of writing is almost epic in its structure.

Edward Larrissy has made an in-depth study of the poem and is of opinion that the poem is a remote comment on both the industrial Revolution and the political revolutions which, it seemed likely. would accompany it. The Tyger represents at one and the same time a natural energy, and something defined by a harsh mechanical process. It can therefore act as a symbol for the position of the emerging industrial proletarist, a symbol which Blake attempts to define in terms of the 'organic' redefined and narrowed by the mechanical. The transition, though it does narrow, also lends terrifying power. Blake was inclined both to approve that power as necessary to the destruction of the old society and to fear the consequences of its limited nature, as he saw it. For, separated from love and innocence. how could it possibly build the new society he hoped for? The creator of the Tyger, who is like His creation, also follows

the same process of narrowing: from being fit to seize the sublime

fire which goes into the making of the Tyger's eyes, he becomes

an alienated labuicr. One way of looking at this process is to see it

as a 'fall', analogous to the idea of a fall from the spiritual world

into nature: in this respect the poem anticipates Blake's myth of

creations fall. But the sublime beauty of the Tyger suggests that only

in partial and limited forms could anything exist, just as one could

only believe anything by partial and prejuoiced 'imposition'. But

this dubiety is not resolved: the question whether form is expressive

or limiting remains a question though a troubling one.

God Creator whose range stretches far and near and whose power is unintelligible: He can contain within His Nature such opposites, can exercise His creative power in such contrary and limitless ways. This is the theme of the poem The Tyger and fr

this thematic point of view and in its use of metallic and clanging images to convince us of the beast's awful beauty, the poem invites comparison with The Eagle by Lord Tennyson. The Eagle runs thus:

He clasp the crag with crooked hands

 Close to the sun in lonely lands 

Ringed with the azure world he stands. 

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls,

 He watches from his mountain walls,

 And like a thunderbolt he falls.

2. Compare and contrast The Tyger with The Lamb.

Ans. At simplest reading a great contrast is found between The Tyger from Songs of Experience and The Lamb from Song of Innocence. The speakers in the two poems have different notions of the Deity and the divine nature. The speaker in The Tyger conceives of the Creator dimly in human terms. The Creator of the tiger appears to him an artisan of wonderful skill and strength. The maker might be a subordinate being who collects materials from remote and dangerous parts of the universe with a great daring. The speaker says-

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand dare seize the fire?

The Creator cannot even be described. He has wings, hands and feet, but we never see Him. One is fascinated to see the details of the immense being carried forward to create the tiger. We see the shoulder exerting its strength, the hand in firm control of the materials and the feet as He moves about:

And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

The Creator of the tiger is also a god of wrath. On the

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other hand, the Creator of the lamb is a god of mercy, the lamb of innocence. The Creator is of meek and mild nature. The speaker in The Lamb asks,

Little Lamb, who made thee? 

Dost thou know who made thee?

And he himself answers:

Little Lamb, I'll tell thee, 

Little lamb, I'll tell thee:

 He is called by thy name, 

For he calls himself a Lamb. 

He is meek, & he is mild; 

He became a little child. I, a child, and thou a lamb,

We are called by his name.

So the speaker's idea of the Creator in The Lamb is complete. free from ambiguity.

In The Tyger the speaker has constant questionings but cannot hope for any answer and even cannot know if his questions are the relevant ones. As the beast takes shape, the tension becomes greater, the questions break off in mid-sentences and the questioner speaks in breathless grasp of wonder until the process is complete at the end of the Stanza IV. On the contrary, the child asks the question of the lamb and gives confident answers. The child knows that the replies he makes to the questions are sure and correct. It is because the speaker is a child and he is not concerned with distant or ultimate things. He knows who the maker is but he does not concern himself with the baffling question of the mystery of the creation. The child's mind is occupied with the present actuality of the lamb and with the actualities of his own protected existence. The child only knows the benin aspect of life and is familiar with the gentle lamb but not with the tiger which destroys. His God is a God of mercy of mild and meek nature.

The two poems The Tiger and The Lamb present us with altogether two different states of mind-that of the adult who is

WILLIAM BLAKE

aware of the harsh realities of life, of the awful beauty represented by the tiger and mystery of creation and that of the child who is serene in his simple appreciation and knowledge and who is always satisfied with what he has as gifts from the Creator and who is able to accept naive explanations of existence. So the child does not undergo any tension in the mind like the speaker in The Tyger. He does not suffer from any spiritual crisis any psychological conflict within his mind and bafflement of any kind.

In The Tyger the poet has resorted to an abundance of imageries and symbols to lead the readers to profound truths. In The Tyger the metallic and clanging imagery is suggested by the use of the hammer, the chain and the anvil. The physical exertions of the Creator at work wrestling with his stupendous creation are suggested by the shoulder, hand and feet. The tiger are symbolizes the fierce forces in the soul which are needed to break the bonds of experience. The forests represent ignorance, repression and superstition. The stars stand for the material powers of the rebel angels. On the contrary, in The Lamb the questions answer from has been adopted to drive home the profound truth instead of an abundant use of imageries. The only symbols used in the poem are the lamb which denotes the qualities like gentleness, meekness and mildness and the child, the living evidence of God's love.

3. Write a note on Blake's use of imagery and symbolism in The Tyger and in The Lamb.

Ans. Blake was a mystic poet and this 'mystic movement of his mind required metaphor, he saw not likeliness but identities'. So the images and symbols are found galore in his poems. The image is generally viewed as single in dimension while the symbol as more complex. To Blake these are the media of expressing ideas.

The Tyger is a classic poem in its abundant use of images and symbolism. The images here have special strength and freedom. These have a greater significance in their context 'to work effectively in the poem without reference to anything outside'. They are so

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compelling that for most purposes they explain themselves and we have an immediate, overwhelming impression of an awful power lurking in the darkness of being and forcing on us questions which pierce to the heart of life."

The images used in the opening lines of the poem have a vivid visual effect. The tiger lurking in the darkness is a stupendous creation. The poet says:

Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright 

In the forests of the night.

In the alliterative line a sound imagery too has been used. The metallic, clanging imagery has been used in mid-sentence like what the hammer? What the chain? and What the anvil? There is a power in the phrase 'fearful symmetry' which is almost physical, tangible and tactile. The notion of physical immediacy of the beast has been conveyed in the line 'what the hand dare seize the fire?'

Blake's imagery in the poem has its shifts and changes from single dimension of either sound or sight and this is found later in the poem when a picture of the physical exertions of the Creator wrestling with his awful creation is conjured up:

And what shoulder, and what art, 

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

But the imagery is the poem gains in added significance and magnitude when it moves into the arena of symbolism. Blake's spelling of Tyger is worth noting 'for it seems to emphasize the symbolic quality of the animal'. The tiger symbolizes the fierce forces in the soul which are needed to break the bonds of experience. To some the tiger with its fearful symmery stands for the pervasive evil in the world, for others, the tiger symbolizes an awful beauty. In creation: and for some others the tiger is a symbol of praise for the creation of the universe. The forests of night represent ignorance repression and superstition. To some, the forest is the 'world of experience, where the many sterile errors (dead trees) conceal the path and dim the light."

The word fire is a symbol of wrath. To Spenser wrath is a

WILLIAM BLAKE

fire. Milton wrote of flames as the 'sign of wrath awaked'. Blake's association of fire with his tiger is found in the lines 1, 6 and 8:

Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

What the hand dare seize the fire?

Further, the stars in 'When the stars threw down their spears' symbolize the material power. The stars also suggest the angels.

A deep religious feeling pulsates through the poem The Lamb.

And this has been conveyed through the images. But the images used in the poem are not so rampant as in The Tyger. The lamb, the child and Christ are identified in the poem. Christ is known as the lamb. He had qualities of meekness, gentleness and mildness.

Christ was also a child when he first appeared on this earth as the Son of God. The child in The Lamb speaks:

He is called by thy name,

 For he calls himself a Lamb. 

He is meek, & he is mild;

 He became a little child.

 I, a child, and thou a lamb, 

We are called by his name.

The end 

Thanks