The Tyger”

3 Pages 817 Words

Patricia Sayles
ENGL 1302
March, 13 2004


The Tyger is perhaps, apart from the words to the hymn Jerusalem the best known of all Blake’s work. As the contrary poem to The Lamb, The Tyger is straight from the heart of the Songs of Experience. The Tyger it is a poem that addresses our constant struggle to decode, interpret and master the world around us, as well as a satire on the ways we attempt to carry this task out, I prefer to interpret The Tyger as a poem that addresses the creation of evil in the world. The Tyger is a poem full of rich, powerful imagery and sound. We will address Blake’s use of the variations within it as a mechanism used to communicate to the reader this attack on the Establishment.

Metrically, The Tyger is principally trochaic which creates a forceful drum-beat reflecting the power of both the tyger and its Creator. Beginning from the first two words; ‘Tyger / Tyger’ this heavy, steady rhythm continues almost throughout and reinforcing it is the repetition of the first stanza as the last. The one small change made the substitution of Dare for Could is important as it creates a double stress Dare frame in replacement of the iambic Foot Could frame. The heavy, hammering sound of this foot reflects the fact that the poem’s question has grown; that the more the speaker ponders the tyger, the more astounding its Creator’s power seems. This power that the Creator is indicated to have is important to the development of the poem’s message and it is here that ambiguous areas of the poem must be interpreted; that the tyger is unable to be framed may be read as the inability of anything to control or capture it. Not even the immense power of the Creator is able to constrain the evil that it has created. It is here that the main point of the poem is made, and this is done principally through Irony – the Creator has created a beast burning so brightly of evil that it even shines from the forests of E...