Five-minute digest
The Tyger
Summary
The Tyger is the most famous lyric in William Blake's Songs of Experience, which he etched, printed and hand-coloured in 1794 and issued together with the earlier Songs of Innocence under the subtitle Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. It is the counterpart of The Lamb in Innocence, where a child asks a lamb who made it and answers that its maker is the gentle Lamb of God. The Tyger asks the same question of a terrifying creature and receives no answer at all. The poem is six quatrains of rhymed couplets in short, hammering lines, mostly seven syllables, and almost every sentence is a question. The first stanza addresses the tiger as burning bright in the forests of the night and asks what immortal hand or eye could frame its fearful symmetry. The second asks in what distant deeps or skies the fire of its eyes was kindled and who dared seize that fire, recalling Icarus and Prometheus. In the third and fourth stanzas the maker becomes a blacksmith: shoulder and art twist the sinews of the heart, and hammer, chain, furnace and anvil forge the brain. The questions break into fragments, as if the speaker is overwhelmed. The fifth stanza widens the scene to the cosmos. When the stars threw down their spears and watered heaven with their tears, did the maker smile at his work, and did he who made the Lamb make this? The last stanza repeats the first with one change: could frame becomes dare frame, so the question of ability turns into a question of daring. Readers have heard in the poem the problem of how a good Creator can make a world that includes ferocity and evil, the sublime terror of creation, and an image of revolutionary energy in the years of the French Revolution. Blake never answers. The accompanying plate, with a tiger that many find oddly mild, has added to the debate. The poem has become one of the most anthologized and memorized in English.
Top Lessons
The question that is the poem
The Tyger is built almost entirely of questions, and none is answered. Blake teaches by withholding: the reader is left inside the speaker's awe, made to feel how hard it is to see one Creator behind both lamb and tiger.
Creation as a forge
In stanzas 3 and 4 the Creator is a smith with hammer, chain, furnace and anvil, working by force and heat. The image presents making as dangerous labour, and the tiger as something wrought rather than gently grown.
Two contrary states
The Tyger answers The Lamb of Songs of Innocence. Blake sets innocence and experience side by side without letting either cancel the other, and the line about him who made the Lamb asks the reader to hold both creatures together under one maker.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“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 sieze the fire?”
“What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp?”
Frequently cited
“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?”
“What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?”