The Tyger

by William Blake

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 the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered 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?

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Podcast transcript

Last month we looked at Christopher Smart’s delightful poetic description of his cat Jeoffry. And in that podcast I said that there were several similarities between Smart and William Blake. They were 18th century contemporaries, Smart was about 35 years older than Blake. They both wrote poetry of a strongly religious, even mystical cast. And they were both accused of being mad, specifically of suffering from religious mania.

And slightly tongue in cheek, last month I said that they also both wrote famous cat poems. Blake’s cat poem poem being this one – in other words, a big cat poem. So I thought it would be nice to follow up that episode with a look at Blake’s famous poem, ‘The Tyger’.

And, my goodness, this poem is famous, isn’t it? I mean, you almost certainly know this poem, even if you hardly ever read poetry. It’s so well known it almost has the status of a nursery rhyme or a hymn. And maybe it’s too popular for its own good, because it’s one of those poems, a bit like some famous paintings or sculptures or pieces of music, that we all have an image of it in our minds, and it’s hard to see the actual piece itself because it’s so popular and prevalent in our culture. It’s been recorded and parodied and so on.

So ‘The Tyger’ is an extremely famous poem, but what I’m going to try and do today is to take a fresh look at it and see it see how it works. To see how Blake has conjured his tiger so vividly that its leaps off the page as full of energy today as when Blake wrote it, over 200 years ago.

And the way I did this for myself was simply to read it out loud. I’ve said this before, I really recommend you read the poems on the podcast out loud for yourself. Because nothing makes you pay attention to what is really there on the page like having to read out and articulate every single word of the poem. No matter how well you think you know it, you’ll discover something new when you do this.

So. ‘The Tyger’ was originally published in 1794 in a book called Songs of Innocence and of Experience, which was a sequel to Blake’s book Songs of Innocence, published five years earlier. And the idea of innocence versus experience was an important polarity in Blake’s thought. You know, more conventional morality frames things in terms of good and evil but Blake took a more subtle and less judgmental view, he liked to contrast innocence with experience because experience isn’t necessarily evil, it’s more world-weary, having faced up to some uncomfortable truths.

And I think the uncomfortable truth that is foregrounded in this poem is its central question: how on earth did a supposedly loving creator make a creature like the tiger who is so fierce and so terrifying – so ‘fearful’?

As Blake puts it towards the end of the poem:

Did He who made the lamb make thee?

That mention of the lamb is actually a allusion, a pre-internet hyperlink if you like, to another poem of Blake’s in Songs of Innocence called ‘The Lamb’. Which is fairly short, so I’ll read it now so we can appreciate the contrast between the two poems:

Little lamb, who made thee?
Does thou know who made thee,
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little lamb, who made thee?
Does thou know who made thee?

Little lamb, I’ll tell thee;
Little lamb, I’ll tell thee:
He is callèd by thy name,
For He calls Himself a Lamb.
He is meek, and He is mild,
He became a little child.
I a child, and thou a lamb,
We are callèd by His name.
Little lamb, God bless thee!
Little lamb, God bless thee!

It’s very different in tone, isn’t it? Even though some of the rhythms and phrasing are very similar to ‘The Tyger’. So first of all, I think we can see why Blake’s lamb, bless it, is not as famous as his tiger. It’s sweet. It’s sentimental. It’s a bit soppy for our tastes these days, or at least mine.

But even beyond that, I think Blake is up against the basic problem that when it comes to literature, it’s hard to make innocence and virtue interesting and memorable. Evil and violence and terror are much more exciting, they give you so much more to work with as a writer.

So on its own, ‘The Lamb’ is not as interesting as ‘The Tyger’. But when we read ‘The Tyger’ in the light of ‘The Lamb’, the contrast renders it even more powerful and even more urgent, because it adds extra rhetorical force to the questions that the speaker of ‘The Tyger’ is asking.

So the speaker of ‘The Lamb’ does ask questions. He starts with them:

Little lamb, who made thee?
Does thou know who made thee,

But there’s nothing remotely disturbing or unsettling about these questions, or about the image of the lamb in its ‘Softest clothing, woolly, bright’, and its ‘tender voice, / Making all the vales rejoice’. And if this weren’t soppy and boring enough, Blake snuffs out any hint of dramatic tension by answering the questions in the second half of the poem:

Little lamb, I’ll tell thee;
Little lamb, I’ll tell thee:
He is callèd by thy name,
For He calls Himself a Lamb.

So the lamb, being referred to here is obviously Jesus; the lamb of God was one of the titles given to Christ in the New Testament. Which makes for another link with Christopher Smart – if you recall, Smart’s poem last month was called Jubilate Agno, Latin for ‘Rejoice in the Lamb’. But I’m afraid that’s the only interesting thing about this stanza, because by answering the questions in such a pat and patronising way, Blake ties everything up with a neat little theological bow, and sucks all the life out of the poem. We can all rest easy in our beds knowing we are safely tucked up with the lamb, but not many of us will want to read this poem again.

But when we turn from ‘The Lamb’ to ‘The Tyger’, then ‘The Tyger’ looks even more restless and disturbing than it did at first glance. Because ‘The Tyger’ is all questions: every line, every sentence, is just one question after another. And none of the questions are answered. So just for that alone, we can see that ‘The Tyger’ is a more open-ended and unsettling poem.

So let’s briefly run through these questions, to get a sense of the structure and progression of the poem, starting with the first stanza:

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

So the basic question here, which resonates through the poem, is ‘what immortal hand or eye’, in other words what kind of God or divine being – could create such a terrifying and beautiful creature as the tiger? Which Blake encapsulates in that unforgettable phrase, ‘fearful symmetry’. Presumably alluding the symmetrical patterns of the tiger’s stripes.

Then the next stanza asks where the tiger came from, was it down in the deeps or up in the skies?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

Then we get these two very suggestive but slightly puzzling lines:

On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

So I assume that the ‘he’ here must refer to God the Creator, because the tiger is consistently addressed in the second person, ‘thy’ and ‘thee’ throughout, and every instance of ‘he’ in the poem seems to refer to God.

In which case, this is a pretty startling couplet, because it suggests that God is ‘aspiring’ on wings, and ‘daring’ to ‘seize’ the fire, as if he were stealing it. Which makes him sound like one of the rebel angels in Milton’s Paradise Lost, or Prometheus in the ancient Greek myth, who was punished by the gods for stealing fire from them and giving it to humankind. So the theological implications of this are pretty startling, to say the least.

Okay, the next stanza continues the enumeration of the attributes of the Creator:

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?

So we’ve gone from the Creator’s wings and hand to his shoulder and hand and feet, which are ‘twisting’ the sinews of the tiger’s heart, not trying to break them, but twisting them together.

Then in the fourth stanza, we find ourselves in God’s workshop, with all the tools of His trade, the hammer and anvil and so on:

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

Then the fifth stanza is the moment when God has finished his labours and steps back to consider his handiwork. And of course if we know our Book of Genesis as well as Blake knew his, we would expect this to be a moment of satisfaction, when ‘God saw that it was good’, but what Blake gives us is very different:

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?

I’m not sure what exactly Blake means by those two spectacular lines:

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,

The phrase ‘the stars threw down their spears’ also occurs in his poem Vala, or the Four Zoas, as part of a description of the Fall from grace. So Blake evidently associated the image with cosmic disruption, ‘a great disturbance in the Force’, as Obi-Wan Kenobi would put it. And this is the moment when the tiger comes into being. But as I say, instead of it being a moment of satisfaction, Blake dares to question whether God thought his creation was good:

Did He smile His work to see?

And then we get to the crucial question:

Did He who made the lamb make thee?

And Blake doesn’t answer this question, but if we consider the implications then it’s frankly terrifying either way. Because if it’s not the same God who made the lamb who has made the tiger, when who is this alternative Creator, who has licence to create terrifying and disruptive creatures like the tiger, within the Christian universe of the Lamb?

But on the other hand, if it is the same God, then who is this God, that we thought we knew and trusted, who made the little lamb in his woolly coat, who protected us and sang us to sleep at night? Is there another side to this God, that we haven’t considered?

Okay, then we get to the final stanza. And it’s a repeat, almost word for word, of the first stanza, it goes ‘Tyger, tyger, burning bright’ etcetera, all the way down to the final line, where Blake has changed a single word. So instead of:

What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

We have:

What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

And that’s quite a big leap, isn’t it? From asking what kind of deity ‘could’ create the tiger, to what kind of deity ‘dare’ create him? That little change makes a world of difference.

Because first of all, he’s asking, what kind of creator could make this terrifying creature? And is it the same God of love who made the gentle lamb? It’s hard enough to reconcile those two apparent opposites.

But by the end of the poem Blake is asking – and this is a really weird and paradoxical and scary thought – does the Creator of the universe, the all powerful, the immortal, God, does He dare to do this? Would he not be afraid to do this? And maybe there’s even a shade of: does he have the right to do this?

So what we’ve got here is the idea of a creation that is in danger of surpassing its creator, of escaping his control, his intentions and with potentially disastrous consequences. And there’s several ways we could read or interpret this. I’ve already mentioned the uncanny resemblance of the Creator of the tiger to the rebel angels in Milton’s Paradise Lost. And Blake made a famously provocative comment about that poem:

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.

We could easily apply this comment to Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and say that the poet of ‘The Lamb’ is no match for the poet of ‘The Tyger’, because the former is clearly and conventionally on the side of the ‘Angels & God’, whereas the latter seems to be charged with the satanic energy of Milton’s Devil, which threatens to burst free of received ideas of morality and religion.

We could also read the poem another way, by remarking that it’s probably no coincidence that that Blake was writing at the time of the industrial revolution, with the emergence of what he memorably described as ‘dark satanic mills’. So the images of the fire and the furnace conjure that world of fire and iron and steel.

And if we want to take this reading a little further, seeing the tiger as a symbol of the industrial revolution, then maybe we could see it as an early example of anxiety about technology getting out of control, of taking on a life of its own and wreaking havoc in ways that we never anticipated when we set out on the path of innovation.

Remember, ‘The Tyger’ was published in 1794, just twenty years before Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, the archetypal story of a creator who regrets giving life to his creation; we’ve already picked up a hint of Prometheus in ‘The Tyger’, and it’s perhaps not surprising that Shelley sub-titled Frankenstein ‘The Modern Prometheus’.

I’m also thinking of Robert Oppenheimer, who famously expressed regret for his contribution to the invention of the atom bomb; he said after he watched the first test of the bomb, that he thought of the line from the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu scripture, where the God Vishnu shows Krishna his terrifying, destructive aspect, and says ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’.

And we could keep going down this path and draw parallels with the current fear and anxiety in the headlines around artificial intelligence. The idea that we’re creating this technology that is starting to get out of control, and where is this going to lead? And there are some prominent technologists starting to call for a pause or a brake on the research. But on the other hand, of course, there is this huge excitement and enthusiasm about the transformative possibilities of AI, which seems to be generating an irresistible energy.

Now. I’m obviously not suggesting that we reduce ‘The Tyger’ to an allegory of fear of technology because that would really kill the poem. But I do think that the poem embodies a similar duality, between the fear and anxiety, the responsibility of creation, and the excitement and energy of creation; with that sense that there is something so irrepressible about the tiger that it can’t be bounded within our normal concepts of reality and morality. And that makes ‘The Tyger’ thrilling in a way that frankly, ‘The Lamb’ is not.

Okay, zooming in a bit, as you know, we like to do on this show, on the verse form… What we can see Blake doing is using this to embody and enact everything that I’ve just talked about – the wonder, the fear, the obsession, that anxiety and the energy.

So if you look at the text of the poem – and you can find this on the website, amouthfulofair.fm or in the email transcript of the show, if you subscribe to that. We’ve got six quatrains, four-line stanzas, which are made up of very regular rhyming couplets. And the metre of the poem is something called trochaic tetrameter.

So trochaic metre is the opposite of the iambic metre that was the dominant metre in English language poetry for hundreds of years, from the 14th to the 19th centuries. And we’ve heard a lot of iambic poems on this podcast. So iambic goes ti TUM – an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one.

And trochaic is simply the opposite of this, it puts the stressed syllable first, so you get TUM ti. The word ‘tiger’ is a perfect trochaic foot, because the stress goes on the first syllable and the second one is unstressed.

And I actually did a double-check, because I couldn’t quite believe that this is the first time we’ve looked at a trochaic poem on the podcast. It’s not as common as iambic, but it’s one of my favourite metres and I think it’s underused and overlooked.

So that’s the ‘trochaic’ part of ‘trochaic tetrameter’. And the tetrameter just means that there are four trochaic feet in the line. It goes TUM ti TUM ti TUM ti TUM ti. So this is a perfect trochaic tetrameter:

Tyger, tyger, burning brighter

Okay, got that?

Sorry, what? Oh, yes. Well spotted. That isn’t quite what Blake wrote, is it? I’ve sneakily added an extra syllable, to change ‘bright’ to ‘brighter’:

Tyger, tyger, burning brighter

Whereas what Blake actually wrote is:

Tyger, tyger, burning bright

And obviously this is better, because it’s Blake. But the technical reason it’s better is that the line is more abrupt and forceful. It’s punchier, because it begins and ends on a stress. And if you put several lines like this together, the effect is reinforced, by hearing that stress at the start and end of each line:

Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye

The rhythm really hammers the lines home, doesn’t it?

Now, technically, deleting the final syllable in this way is called catalexis, from the Ancient Greek for ‘leave off’. Which means I’m scanning these lines as trochaic tetrameter catalectic, if you want to impress you friends at dinner parties.

Okay, but why should we care about this kind of technical detail? Because trochaic metre has a very distinctive music and rhythm and energy, that is at the core of the way we experience the poem. For example: we could easily tweak that opening line again, by adding an extra syllable at the beginning, and this would turn it into a perfectly regular iambic tetrameter. Maybe like this:

O Tyger, Tyger, burning bright

And rhythmically and tonally, that sounds quite different, doesn’t it? It feels gentler and more plangent. Not nearly as urgent and insistent as what Blake actually wrote:

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright

And that difference is down to the trochaic metre. The first thing we hear is that initial stress on the ‘Ty-’ of ‘Tyger’. It’s like Blake is jabbing us in the face with his finger, and he does’t let up, he keeps doing it all the way through the line and all the way through the poem. And this action pushes us off balance. It puts us on the back foot. It’s insistent. It’s obsessive. It’s worrying at us, the way the questions worry at us and unsettle us.

And you can hear that Blake’s use of the trochaic metre in the poem is extremely regular. Some stanzas that are 100% perfect trochaic tetrameter catalectic, with no variation at all:

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

And of course the danger of being this regular is that it can sound mechanical and robotic. But ‘The Tyger’ is not robotic at all. It is incantatory: the metre, the alliteration, the rhymes, the repeated words and phrases, all contribute to the hypnotic effect. Blake is casting a spell and summoning the spirit of the tiger, so it is therefore entirely appropriate that he uses a very regular metre. In the poem’s own terms, it has a very regular mathematical symmetry, but it is a fearful symmetry.

Out of the 24 lines of the poem, I can only find five variations in the metre. And it’s precisely because they are so rare, that I think they are really effective. For example, here’s the second to last stanza:

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Notice what happens with the words ‘Did he’ in the third and fourth lines. The third line is perfectly trochaic, so the stress falls on ‘Did’:

Did He smile His work to see?

But in the fourth line, there’s an extra syllable, making it natural to shift the stress onto the word ‘He’:

Did He who made the lamb make thee?

And of course, this shifts the stress onto the most crucial word in the line, and indeed the whole poem, because what the poet is asking is ‘is HE, the loving God who made the lamb, the same God who made the fearsome tiger’?

And Blake does something similar with the words ‘could’ and ‘dare’, in the first and last stanzas. Remember, these stanzas are identical apart from these two words, and swapping one for the other dramatically changes their meaning.

So the first stanza ends:

What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

And it’s natural to read this with the stress on ‘frame’, because that’s the key concept that’s being introduced here. It would be a bit weird to stress ‘could’ and make it really hard to read the line.

But by the time we get to the end of the final stanza:

What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

I think we have to stress ‘dare’, more strongly than ‘frame’ don’t we? Because that’s the new information in the line, it’s deliberately contrasting ‘dare’ with ‘could’ from the first stanza. And as we’ve already seen, that dare is absolutely critical to the the existential terror that is at the heart of the poem.

And what Blake has done here incredibly skilfully, and hopefully you can hear it in my reading, is to make a small change that shifts the entire weight of the poem, and the cumulative force of all of those obsessive questions, so that it comes down full force onto that word ‘dare’:

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

And I think we feel this instinctively when we read the poem or when we hear it read aloud. And we all know about Blake the Prophet, Blake the inspired Romantic genius. But it’s only really when we look at the construction of the poem, that we can really appreciate the extreme level of skill that Blake the craftsman has put into his masterpiece.

And let’s remember that Blake worked as an engraver. He was very familiar with the messy and laborious process of engraving and printing. So I think we should appreciate the fact that this is the work of a master craftsman, who was able to judge everything so finely that the force of the entire poem comes down on that word ‘dare’ with the weight of a hammer blow.

And maybe we should also consider, as I’m sure Blake did, that the tiger actually has two creators. There’s the tiger out in the world created by God, but also the tiger of the imagination created by Blake.

And maybe we can detect in the poem Blake’s fear of his own imagination, his own genius, which as we know caused him to see visions of spirits and deities as if they were real. And in his tiger we can sense the poem taking over from the poet and threatening to burst the bonds of whatever he had in mind when he started writing.

So it’s a poem of fear, but also a poem of courage, to unleash the tiger in all its glory and all the terror and uncertainty of its unanswerable questions.

 

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The Tyger

by William Blake

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 the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered 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?

---

William Blake

William Blake was an English poet and artist who was born in 1757 and died in 1827. A trained engraver and printmaker, he often illustrated his own poetry. His religious visions and unorthodox opinions and behaviour meant he was often labelled mad or eccentric by his contemporaries, but he has come to be regarded as one of the great mystical and visionary poets in the English language. His publications included the short lyrics of Songs of Innocence and Experience and a series of longer poems that are now called ‘the prophetic books’. In 2002 he was voted as number 38 in a BBC poll of The 100 Greatest Britons. 

 

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A Mouthful of Air – the podcast

This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday.

You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your favourite app.

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The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman.

A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant.