(The Tyger - Question & Answers)

👉 ‘The Tyger’ - the central idea of the poem

Answer: It is difficult to understand whether William Blake's poem "The Tyger" is about tigers or about God. The answer is not consistent with the context of the poem but with the title of the compilation from which it is derived.

The tiger gives the example of ‘experience’ as opposed to ‘innocent’. According to Blake, we can divide the whole human experience of the world into three parts -innocence, experience, and finally a higher innocence, or Blake, whom he identified as ‘Beulah’.

In the scheme of composing the title, ‘Song of Innocence and Experience’, "The Lamb" and "The Tyger" are companion poems and they represent the opposite. ‘The Lamb’ represents innocence. It’s a beautiful and peaceful world. This is the world where God looks kindly on all His creation. Christ was sent to this world because people prayed for salvation. The priests have led their people well, and so Christ the Lamb has come to save them all from the curse.

In contrast, 'The Tyger’ represents the experience. It’s a difficult world where survival is not easy. Man is unable to understand why God loves him and why he created such a terrible creature as the tiger.

However, God knows very well that there must be balance and symmetry between every object and creature in the world. Without darkness, people will never see light. Without sorrow, men can never value happiness. This is why God created a human world with both joy and fear and ensured that man learns to deal with both. Once a person understands how to do it he can find a way to survive in this harsh world with a smile on his face and many of his fears will be put away for now.

👉 The Tyger – Theme of Uncertainty and Ambiguity

Answer: Whereas ‘The Lamb’ gives the reader a simple reassurance and presents the loving, majestic God of the New Testament, the creation of ‘The Tyger’ as mysterious and unknown. Some critics appreciate this as an indication of a painful, fallen world experience where certainty is impossible; the 'deep depths' only suggest insecurity and epistemological chaos.

‘The Tyger’, thus becomes a part of the pessimism and anguish of experience. But perhaps there is another way to understand the refusal to offer a straightforward answer. As Heather Glen suggests, Blake's ambiguity is a part of a broader challenge for eighteenth-century readers who are familiar with the fashionable educational literature of the time of literature that provides a clear, educational, moral conception.

The ‘contemporary reader’, Glen writes, ‘was probably disturbed by the outlook on life implied by the songs; But more fundamentally - albeit perhaps less consciously - is the annoying fact that there seems to be no clear argument between them.

The radical nature of Blake's poetry, Glen suggests, is due to its ambiguity and its lack of clear moral interpretation. For Blake, imagination is the ultimate creative force: ‘What has now been proven was once imagined,’ he wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

However, its intricate and mysterious metaphor creates a space where imagination can be expressed. Enemy of the ever-narrow, earth-friendly materialism, Blake has described the ‘forest of the night’ as a place where we can dare to express and express the ‘frightening symmetry’ of imagination.

👉 "Did the one who made the lamb make thee?" Explain

Answer: Appearing in 'Song of Experience', 'The Tyger' is generally understood as a companion part of 'The Lamb' in 'Songs of Innocence'; both poems ask the same question:

"Where are we from?"

There is an answer in ‘The Lamb’: God created us - a simple confirmation of faith. 'The Tyger' only answers rhetorical questions:

"Did the one who made the lamb make thee?"

In fact, one of the most notable features of ‘The Tiger’ is that it takes the form of a series of questions, none of which are answered. Whereas ‘The Lamb’ considers the process of earthly creation to be natural and consistent, on the other hand, ‘The Tiger’ shows us something more violent, terrifying and mysterious; the tiger emerges arrogantly from the forest at night and his eyes glow "in the depths of the distance and in the sky." Its creation is a conflict and an act of adventure.

The poem moves between 'cloud' (ability) and 'courage' (which signifies transgression and disobedience). The final stanza ends in 'courage', a direct repetition of the first without changing the verbs at the beginning of the final line, which is characterized by a spondee ('Dare frame'), emphasizes the significance of (cloud frame) instead of iambic (4) in the first stanza. Ok

👉 The Tyger - the image of rebellion and revolution

Answer: William Blake’s poem, The Tyger is enameled with references to rebellion; To Satan's Rebellion in the epic, Paradise Lost (they threw their spears), to Prometheus, the Romantics' favorite rebel (‘what’s the hand dear size the fire?'), and perhaps to Icarus (‘which wing does he dare to hope for?') - Although this line can easily awake Milton's devil. Such images, according to some critics, have made ‘The Tyger’ a metaphor for revolution. At the suggestion of Peter Ackroyd,

“Even while Blake was working on the poem, French revolutionaries were portrayed as a mad beast - after the Paris massacre of September 1792.” An English statesman declared, "One might think of establishing a Republic of tiger in some forests in Africa”.

In The Prelude, Wordsworth describes post-revolutionary Paris as a "place of fear" and "like a tiger's nest like wood without defense." The tiger, strong, unpredictable, gorgeous, but deadly, became a powerful figure for W.B. Yates would later call the revolution "terrible beauty."

👉 The Tyger - Images of Industry

Answer: Another complex aspect of Blake's metaphor in the poem, The Tyger is that the 'tiger', in contrast to the 'lamb' created by God, owes its existence to an industrial process, a combination of human labor.

The third stanza focuses on human endeavors, soldiers and art, which “twists the sinews of the heart." The fourth stanza gives the idea of tiger’s creation in terms of industry using multiple metaphors to imitate the blacksmith: ‘hammer’, ‘chain’, ‘furnace’, ‘anvil’ etc.

Although all the romantic black aspects were driven out by the Industrial Revolution and its subsequent human objectivity, this poem has an undeniable power and fascination with what art can create:

"What dread grasp

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?"

It is interesting to note that both the worker and the tiger are represented by a strange combination of body parts ('shoulder', 'heart', 'sinews', 'hand', 'feet', 'brain'). A parallel might be drawn with an animal created in ‘a workshop of filthy creation’ in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, another text that draws on both Paradise Lost and Prometheus Myth, asking question; “who created us?” and condemns industrialization.

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