If you're anything like me, your exposure to poetry in high school was spotty at best. But odds are that you came across William Blake's "The Tyger" at some point in one of your classes.
I have an odd relationship with Blake. I have known for a long time that he was one of the giants of Western literature, and yet I found myself consistently shying away from his body of work. I read The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Song of Innocence and Experience, and I loved them. But somehow I still felt distant from him.
Lately I have come back to his poetry and I think I am finally piercing the veil. I am starting to get a sense of the scope of his work, and I am beginning to see his ironies more clearly. They are often amazingly subtle.
So back to "The Tyger." And speaking of subtle irony, a beginner to Blake is likely to mistake the voice of the speaker of the poem for Blake's own. Let's look at the poem in its entirety.
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 sieze 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?
from Songs of Innocence and Experience
If you don't have a good sense of Blake's antipathy toward religion, you're liable to hear this poem as awe-struck praise and fear of a God that could create such a dreadful and powerful creature. However, Blake wanted us to hear this poem as a satire of such a view. Look what he has to say in the late epic Jerusalem:
Go, tell them that the Worship of God, is honouring his gifts
In other men; & loving the greatest men best, each according
To his Genius: which is the Holy Ghost in Man; there is no other
God, than that God who is the intellectual fountain of Humanity
Blake distrusted religion because it locates divinity outside of man. Grace is given because Man lacks it. Blake felt that divinity, to the extent that it existed, was located inside of Man. He views the worship of a divinity outside of Man to be Satanic. Thus in the Marriage he tells us, "the Jehovah of the Bible [is] no other than he who dwells in flaming fire."
Now that we have a sense of Blake's view of religion and the poem's irony, let's look the details of "The Tyger."
One of the things that stuck out to me most when I was in high school was the clanging slant rhyme of "hand or eye" and "symmetry." We expect the singsong-y full rhymes of the rest of the poem, and we are let down. Think about the words he's choosing here, though. The full rhyme of the rest of the poem creates the symmetry of couplets. How interesting, then, that he chooses to ruin this symmetry with the word symmetry. Something is wrong.
Blake believed that the world thrives on contrarieties. He chooses a couple of dialectics to express this idea. Two examples are the Prolific & the Devourer and Energy & Reason. Energy and the Prolific are creators. Reason and the Devourer are limiters. Creation and limitation, constantly pushing against each other. If we had only the Prolific or Energy, existence would be chaos. If we had only the Devourer or Reason, we would have what Harold Bloom calls "the static Heaven of Milton." We would exist in utter stasis.
So the asymmetry of Blake's rhyme reflects the asymmetry of the speaker's religious beliefs. By locating divinity outside of man, he is falling prey to the trap of Reason, of the Devourer. He is an uncreative or non-creative speaker. He needs the balance of Energy, which comes from Hell in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
The speaker ends in mystery, which Blake detested. He thought that religion's tendency to resort to Mystery was, in so many words, a cop-out. Here's what Bloom has to say about it: "The speaker has worked himself into the dilemma of orthodox theology in regard to the problem of God's Mercy and His Wrath, and resorts to the orthodox resolution of bringing forth a Mystery."
Though this might satisfy the reader who is comfortable with orthodox theology, Blake wanted his readers to add another layer of meaning: locating divinity outside of Man results in paradoxes that can only be solved with anti-intellectual smoke and mirrors. Blake challenges us to see our own divinity, which is to say strengthen our intellects.
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