William Blake

We know relatively little about Blake’s life (1757-1827).

He was an engraver by profession, a poor working-class Londoner.

He was a radical all his life,

- opposing all forms of authority, rationalism and materialism.

Blake formed part of the same circle as Thomas Paine, Mary

Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.
- Blake provided illustrations for Joseph Johnson’s edition of Mary
Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life (1791).

In contrast to Wordsworth, his genius went largely1 unrecognized during

his lifetime.
- Wordsworth thought Blake was mad.
- Blake read some of Wordsworth’s poetry and didn’t think much of it.

However, his reputation has risen almost continuously since his death.

He is one of the few people considered a great artist and a great poet.
- One of the very few who fully integrated his two art forms.

1 largely – mostly, more or less

Innocence & Experience

Notice the (usually omitted) subtitle of The Songs of Innocence and of

Experience:
Shewing2 the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (1794)
- in innocence we look at things freshly
- with experience our perception is darkened by adult fears and anxieties
(the effects of alienation).
We see the world more deeply3 but we feel it more painfully.

The combination may lead to4 some higher truth.

For Blake innocence can be reborn at any point in time

- to provide an alternative to the bitterness5 and oppression which
Experience critiques.

For Blake the innocence of a child could be superior to the errors of

acquired folly.

But without perceiving the barren world of oppression the potentiality of

Innocence cannot be grasped.

2 shewing – (archaic) showing

3
deeply – profoundly, insightfully
4 to lead to (lead-led-led) – result in
5 bitterness – resentment
Melting Surfaces

Blake in many senses connects more closely to mediaeval art than to his
contemporaries.
- His pictures are mystic and Gothic (in the pictorial sense).
- His poems are ‘illuminated’ – like mediaeval manuscripts.
- His poetry has much more to do with sermons than neoclassical poetry.

At the same time his figures are muscular and monumental like
Michelangelo’s (another painter-poet).

His tetrameter – favoured in Songs – links this collection of poetry to

hymns,
nursery rhymes and
ballads.
Blake places himself squarely6 in the popular tradition.

Blake designed Songs to look like a child’s picture-book.

- He did this to subvert the genre – to challenge those writers whose
intention was to shape and control children’s minds through books of
‘instruction and improvement’.

By contrast, he aimed to7 allow8 the child (and adult reader) to engage
imaginatively with texts which were open-ended and uncertain of
reference.

This is Blake’s ‘infernal method’ (recommended in The Marriage of

Heaven and Hell) “melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the
infinite which was hid(den)”.

Notice that few of the illustrations simply show what the poems they
accompany tell.
- Rather9 they enter into a debate with them – prompting us the think
further10.

Blake’s concepts fit well with modern cognitive theory about stimulating
creative thinking.

6 squarely – unambiguously
7 to aim to – try to
8 to allow – enable, permit
9 rather – (in this case) by contrast
10 further – (in this case) more, more deeply
Infant Joy

BABY: I have no name

I am but two days old.—
PARENT: What shall I call thee?
BABY: I happy am assonance
Joy is my name.-- pararhyme
PARENT: Sweet joy befall thee!

Pretty joy!
Sweet joy but two days old.
Sweet joy I call thee;
Thou dost smile,
I sing the while
Sweet joy befall thee.

For the Calvinists babies come into the world contaminated by Original
Sin and have to be cleansed11 by baptism.
- For the Romantics, babies came fresh from God and retained a memory
of Him.

For Blake, we are all born innocent.

- However, whether we remain innocent depends on how we are treated.

Initially, the infant has no name – except perhaps “I am”

- at Exodus 3:13-14 Moses asks God his name and God replies “I am”
- at John 8:58 Jesus adopts the name “I am”.
- this initially tenuous connection is strengthened by the illustration.
Is Blake saying that every baby is potentially divine?

This baby is the perfect innocent who, when left alone to determine its own
nature (the baby names herself), find joy rather than12 guilt13 or
repression within.

The infant is the embodiment14 of innocent happiness

but she needs succour and reassurance
both verbal (“Sweet joy befall thee!”) and
non-verbal (euphony of the song and poetry).
Here she receives both from the narrator.

11 to cleanse – purify
12 rather than – as opposed to, instead of
13 guilt – culpability
14 embodiment – personification, incarnation, incorporation
Is this joyous innocent simply the lack of15 cruel experience of the world?
Is it possible to maintain a childlike innocence throughout16 one’s adult
life?
- If so, is the birth of this life-long joyous innocence the result of vital
succour and reassurance from a very young age?

The poem is open to interpretation from the very title. Does it mean:
the joy of a newborn baby?
the joy produced by a newborn baby?
a baby called ‘Joy’?
the infancy (= origins) of happiness?
or does it mean all this at the same time?

Notice the level of repetition: joy (x6), I (x6), thee (x4), sweet (x4)
The poem is almost hypnotic in its simplicity, its limited range of
language.
Notice the long vowels and the diphthongs ending in semi-vowels/glides
(especially dark ‘l’):
name (x2), am (x2) shall (x2), call (x2), befall (x2), while, smile

This is the language of nursery

rhymes, lullaby, prayer and
incantations
- a type of magical blessing that the
narrator recites or sings over the
infant.

Clearly, the dialogue between a

mother and a two-day-old baby is
fanciful17
- however, Blake is suggesting that
they can effectively communicate
without language (though sounds,
song and love).

15 lack of – absence of
16 throughout – during all of
17 fanciful – unrealistic, imaginary
 Infant Sorrow

My mother groaned, my father wept,

Into the dangerous world I leapt;
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend18 hid in a cloud. pararhyme

Struggling in my father’s hands,

Striving against my swaddling bands,
Bound and weary, I thought best alliteration
To sulk19 upon my mother’s breast. assonance

Again is this:
the sorrow20 of a newborn baby?
the sorrow produced by a newborn baby?
the infancy (= origins) of sadness?
or does it mean all this at the same time?

Immediately the infant is

fearful of the future,
oppressed by the role of the father, and
finally he settles down into21 hypocritical sulking.

His negative experience of the world leads to22 a reaction that contributes
to the world’s ills.

It is our perception of the world and that of those around us that makes
the world safe or dangerous – innocent or cruel.
- the baby quickly learns to play one parent off against the other
(“Struggling in my father’s hands, /... I thought it best / To sulk upon my
mother’s breast.”)

Here the infant receives and absorbs the perspectives of its parents, from
which it has little chance of escaping.

The child is bound like Prometheus but it doesn’t have the energy or even
the motivation to break its bonds through imagination.

18 fiend – demon, devil, enemy

19 to sulk – be resentfully silent
20 sorrow – sadness, unhappiness
21 to settle down into – adopt a stable state of
22 to lead to (lead-led-led) – provoke, cause
It takes on the defensive role of a fiend in a cloud.
The cloud hides the infant’s true nature from itself and its surroundings,
- allowing and forcing it to maintain its fiendishness.

The first quatrain and half of the second include words full of energy, such
as:
‘groaned’, ‘leapt’, ‘piping’, ‘Struggling’, and ‘Striving’,
- while the last couplet gives up in defeat with the words
‘Bound’, ‘weary’, and ‘sulked’.

The lively child has given way to a tired, world-weary infant in mere
moments.

The poem appears foreshortened, unfinished. But this makes it universal.

- It is the start of so many life stories that end in violence and pain.

However, one reason for this is that in the first draft23 the poem continued
for another six stanzas, all much revised in the manuscript before they were
abandoned, in which Blake developed the theme of rivalry between father
and son.

In the illustration the father is

simply absent.

The poem could be seen as a

poetic restating of Rousseau’s
famous comment, “Man is born
free but is everywhere in
chains”.

23 draft – preliminary version

The Tyger

Blake’s best-known poem – with the possible exception of ‘Jerusalem’.

It is ruled by symmetry:
symmetry between stanzas,
symmetry between lines, and
within lines

For this very reason the asymmetry between the first and last verse –
‘could’ being replaced by ‘dare’ – stands out.
- Ironically, the only possible break in the rhyme scheme is precisely on
‘symmetry’ (though it rhymed with ‘eye’ in Early Modern English).

Notice that the poem is made up entirely of24 questions.

Here again we confront Blake’s ambiguity that forces us to interpret the

poem
- we are not told what to think, our imagination is stimulated.

For instance25, ‘dread’ in line 12 is a contradictonym (like ‘cleave’ or

‘sanction’) – it has two opposite meanings (‘fearful’ and ‘fearsome’).
- the most convincing way of translating “What dread hand and what dread
feet?” is “What fearful hand made the Tyger and what fearsome feet the
Tyger has!”

Similarly, ‘to frame’26 could mean

= ‘to shape/make’,
= ‘to imagine’ or
= ‘to describe/turn into a work of art’:
= ‘to control/restrain’

Is the poem asking about the nature of the god who has made such a
beautiful, deadly27 beast?

Is the poem asking about the nature of the poet who dares/is able to
describe such a perfect creature?

24 to be made up of – be composed of
25 for instance – for example
26 in most dictionaries you will find the transitive verb ‘to frame someone’ (e.g. Who Framed Roger Rabbit?)

meaning to fabricate evidence against someone (incriminar). However, the first recorded use of this verb was
in 1910 as part of US slang.
27 deadly – lethal
- Elsewhere Blake – like Coleridge – suggests that the human creator (i.e.
the poet) is simply a version of the divine creator.
- This is not as blasphemous as it might sound. In his Summa Theologiae
Thomas Aquinas compares God, the creator of all things, to an artist.

Does the tiger represent the untameable materials of the imagination?

Does the tiger represent the indomitable in the natural world outside and
the untameable desires and drives of the human mind?
- Can these urges and instincts be ‘framed’ (= controlled, limited)?

Much of Blake’s poetry describes the perennial battle between

the expanding forces of energy and
the restrictive, numbing death-dealing force of reason.

How does the Tyger of the imagination compare with the tiger of Indian
forests?
Why is there such a juxtaposition between the tame-looking, often smiling
tiger Blake illustrates at the bottom of the page and the Tyger of the poem?

Can the artist really frame something as physically alive and three-
dimensional as a tiger in words or ink?
In his/her fear of trying paralleled by our fear of the beast in the dark?

This is meta-literature as it reflects on the creative process in poetry,

especially visionary poetry (the kind of poetry that communicates deep
truths about the universe, often concerning the divine or a higher power).

Are the stars abandoning their weapons or defending themselves in the

fifth stanza?
- if you automatically thought the stars were hurling their spears, notice the
line from Blake’s The Four Zoas, “The stars threw down their spears &
fled naked away.”, which is unambiguous.

Do the ‘cold’ stars recognize that they cannot compete with the beast that
‘burns bright’?

Who is in control of the poem – the artist, God, the Tyger?

Who smiles?
- if we only had the poem we would say God or the artist but in the picture
it is the tiger who is smiling.
The Metaphorical ‘Tiger’

The Tyger is clearly not a real tiger in that he burns bright in the nocturnal
forest whereas a real tiger is essentially invisible in its jungle habitat at
night.

The Tyger is clearly not a real tiger in that he is made using very human
apparatus – a furnace, an anvil, a hammer and a chain: those of a
blacksmith.
- The strong beat of the trochaic tetrameter first emphasized in the
alliterative explosiveness (i.e. plosive alliterations) of the first line
reinforce the sonic image of the pounding hammer and the beating heart.

Is he a symbol of the industrial revolution?

- Is the Tyger equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster – a creation that
threatens to destroy its maker?

Blake saw artisan work – such as his own – as creative and fulfilling
- he saw the new kind of work (or ‘toil’) resulting from the industrial
revolution as quite literally soul-destroying.

Was the Tyger created by a Promethean figure, challenging God and the
stars?

Is the Tyger the creation of a Miltonic Satan in the same way as the Lamb
(Christ) is a creation of God?

Does the Tyger represent French Jacobinism?

- the French Revolution and the ‘Terror’ were described with tiger similes
in The Times on 7 January 1792 and 26 July 1793.

In 1792 Samuel Romilly of the French Republic: “One might as well think
of establishing a republic of tigers in some forest of Africa.”
[He doesn’t explain why the republican tigers might live in Africa!]
- there were newspaper references to “the tribunal of tigers”.
- At a later date Marat’s eyes were said to resemble “those of the tyger
cat”.

In The Prelude, Wordsworth describes post-revolutionary Paris as ‘a place

of fear […] Defenceless as a wood where tigers roam’.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) wrote in an undated letter:
“I would advise you, therefore, not to attempt unchaining the tiger, but to
burn this piece before it is seen by any other person.”
- We don’t know who the letter was addressed to (Blake’s friend Thomas
Paine has been suggested) but the metaphor was clearly floating in the
(New Historical) atmosphere.

Blake’s brilliant contemporary George Stubbs painted several versions of a

white horse being attacked by a lion and Blake later wrote,
“The tygers of wrath28 are wiser than the horses of instruction”, which
seems to almost anticipate Marx’s,
“Philosophers have merely interpreted the world; the point is to change it”.

The Tyger is also echoed in Yeats’s Easter, 1916, “A terrible beauty is

born”.

Ultimately29, the Tyger can represent anything that is fascinating and

dangerous:
from revolution to sexual passion to drugs.
- all these things cause us to lose control.
i.e. we are talking about sublimity

28 wrath – fury, anger

29 ultimately – (false friend) in the final analysis
Sublimity

Edmund Burke distinguished between the sublime and the beautiful in A

Philosophical Inquiry (1757).

Beauty is associated with

brightness,
smoothness and
smallness

Sublimity is associated with

the infinite, terror,
solitude, powerful emotions,
emptiness, spiritual and religious awe, and
darkness, the grandeur of nature.

Burke associated the sublime with ‘delight’ – a feeling of intense relief.

- after an initial response of fear before something that could kill us (e.g.
The Grand Canyon), it is the relief of remembering that our vantage point
is comparatively safe.

For Burke the great English writer of the sublime was John Milton
- Remember that Milton turned Satan into a tiger in the Garden of Eden
when he was stalking Adam and Eve (Bk IV: l. 401).

But the tiger represents more than something that could kill, but won’t.
- tigers were killing British colonists with certain regularity.
Perhaps the last man-eating carnivores left in the experience of modern
man.

The fear of depredation in the dark is perhaps our most primeval fear dating
back to Dinofelis, a predatory cat specialized in hunting hominids.

All this should be seen within the context of the general Romantic creative
anxiety about
- the gap between creation and execution, and
- the difficulty of giving form to what is essentially and elusively
inexpressible.
Theodicy30

Nature, like a work of art, must in some way contain a reflection of its
creator.

The tiger is strikingly beautiful yet also horrific in its capacity for violence.
What kind of a God, then, could or would design such a terrifying beast as
the tiger?

What does the undeniable existence of evil and violence in the world tell us
about the nature of God?

The speaker stands in awe31 of the tiger as a sheer physical and aesthetic
achievement, even as he recoils in horror from the moral implications of
such a creation;
- the poem addresses not only the question of who could make such a
creature as the tiger, but who would perform this act.

This is a question of creative responsibility and of will, and the poet

carefully includes this moral question with the consideration of physical
power.

The use of the word ‘dare’ to replace the ‘could’ of the first stanza
introduces a dimension of aspiration and wilfulness into the sheer might32
of the creative act.

The perspective of experience in this poem involves a sophisticated

acknowledgement of what is unexplainable in the universe.

The open awe of The Tyger contrasts with the easy confidence, in The
Lamb, of a child’s innocent faith in a benevolent universe.

Incidentally, The Tyger was engraved on the back of the copper plate on
which The Lamb had been etched.

Notice however the false dichotomy: the Lamb may represent the
benevolent God but how does the Tyger represent the retribution of a just
God?

30 theodicy – the problem of the existence of evil in a world created by a benevolent, omnipotent God.
31 in awe – astonished, amazed, dumbstruck
32 might – power
In form and content, The Tyger also parallels the Biblical Book of Job.
- Job, too, was confronted by the sheer awe and power of God, who asks
the suffering man a similar series of rhetorical questions designed to lead
Job not to an answer, but to an understanding of the limitations inherent in
human wisdom.

This limitation is forced into view by the final paradox:

“Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”
Can the God of Innocence also be the God of Experience?
- If so, how can mere mortals, trapped in one state or the other, ever hope to
understand this God?
The Tyger in the Context of Blake’s Work
Another way of trying to make sense of this poem is to look at it in the
context of Blake’s other poems.
To start with, it is clearly paired with the ‘song of innocence’ The Lamb.
The innocent sacrificial lamb is a symbol of God’s love.
In this context, the Tyger seems to be a symbol of God’s wrath33
- Or they could relate to nurturing Christ vis à vis the cruel desert God of
the Old Testament.
- Can the two divinities coexist (“Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”)
The innocent lamb is a reflection of its creator, the Lamb of God
- What deity is the Tyger a reflection of then?
The child in The Lamb in his/her innocence can answer all the questions
- however, all the questions in The Tyger are left unanswered.
In Auguries of Innocence (1803?) Blake wrote “God is Light / To those
poor Souls who dwell in Night”.
- Those who live in the darkness of ignorance (the forests of the night),
who cannot satisfactorily integrate the various aspects of their experience
(as the child in The Lamb can), come to see that experience as controlled
by some frightening force.
In Europe, a Prophecy (1794) the coming to power of reason spreads34
darkness and creates forests of error:
“Thought changed the infinite [i.e. God] to a serpent... and man fled from
its face and hid in forests of night...
In Vala, or The Four Zoas (1795-1804) Urizen’s “tygers roam in the
redounding smoke / In forests of affliction.”
- Urizen represents reason and in Blake’s theology is paired with Los,
imagination.
Is the forest of the night simply our sleeping nightmare in which we are the
prey of experience?

Ultimately35, The Tyger is a great example of T S Eliot’s claim that

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

33 wrath – fury, anger

34 to spread (spread-spread-spread) – propagate
35 ultimately – (false friend) in the final analysis
The Indian-ness of the Tyger

The imagery of fire with its simultaneous connotations of

creation,
purification, and
destruction.
These are the attributes of Shiva (Cf. Shelley tutorial notes)
Charles Wilkins’s 1785 translation of the Bhagavad Gita was welcomed by
London radicals (such as Blake’s friends Fuseli and Johnson).
- is the Indian-ness of both the tiger and Shiva important?

David Weir36 links The Tyger to revolutionary currents in India.

Encouraged by the power vacuum left by the French Revolution, the
Muslim leader Tipu Sultan (1750-99) – self-declared “Citizen Tipu” –
began to attack the British.
- Tipu was known as ‘The Tiger of Mysore’ and the tiger was his symbol.
- He was a pioneer in the use of rocket artillery.
- Even though he was overwhelmed by General Munro in 1792, a different
kind of defeat was noted by the British public when it became known that
the general’s son had been killed by an Indian tiger in the same year.

Weir’s neat conclusion is that The Tyger was not only written in response
to young Munro’s death, but that its tiger was also partly Indian.

36 in Brahma in the West: William Blake and the Oriental Renaissance (2003)
Extension

Find out about Tipu’s Tiger (a.k.a.37 Tippoo’s Tiger) a contemporary (c.
1795) India objet d’art in the Victoria & Albert Museum.
- How does this visual artistic rendition of a tiger compare to Blake’s
poem?

37 a.k.a. – also known as

The Tyger

Tyger38! Tyger! burning bright alliteration

In the forests of the night, assonance
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? alliteration, iambic tetrameter

In what distant deeps39 or skies assonance, alliteration

Burnt the fire of thine eyes? assonance
On what wings dare he aspire40?41
What the hand dare sieze42 the fire?43

And what shoulder44, & what art,

Could twist the sinews45 of thy heart? assonance, iambic tetrameter
46
And when thy heart began to beat, pararhyme, iambic tetrameter
47 48
What dread hand? & what dread feet? polysyndeton

What the hammer? what the chain? polysyndeton

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

When the stars threw down their spears49, alliteration

And watered heaven with their tears, alliteration, iambic tetrameter
Did he smile his work to see? alliteration
Did he who made the Lamb make thee? internal rhyme, iambic tetrameter

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright alliteration

In the forests of the night, assonance
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? alliteration, iambic tetrameter

38 this spelling of ‘tiger’ was already old-fashioned. Blake presumably chose it because it looks more
mysterious or because it looks more like a name (cf. tailor vs. Taylor, hide vs. Hyde)
39 a possible reference to Ovid, “the Tyger fierce was borne upon the deep” [Metamorphoses, 1, 156]
40 to aspire – a. rise up, b. have a burning ambition
41 a reference to Icarus?
42 Blake’s spelling of ‘seize’
43 the hand that dare seize the fire could be a reference to Prometheus
44 shoulder – (in this case) strength
45 sinews – muscles, tendons
46 a possible reference to Ovid, “I may confess right well That of a Tyger I was bred : and that within my

breast A heart more hard than any steel or stony rock doth rest.” [Metamorphosis, VII, 43-45]
47 dread – fearful. terrified
48 dread – fearsome, terrifying
49 threw down their spears – a. abandon one’s weapons. b. defend oneself from on high
Form

The poem is comprised of six quatrains in rhymed couplets.

Does the meter imitate

the hammering beat of the smithy that is the poem’s central image or
the unstoppable advancing tiger?

It certainly imitates nursery rhymes:

Twinkle, Twinkle, little star Jack be nimble, Jack be quick

How I wonder what you are Jack, jump over the candlestick

Notice how Blake expects us to treat ‘fire’ as two syllables in line 6 but as
a monosyllable in line 8.

Bibliography
The Poetry of William Blake by Michael Ferber [Penguin Critical Studies, 1991]
Songs of Innocence and of Experience by Richard Willmott [Oxford Student Texts,
1990]
Songs of Innocence and of Experience by Dominic Hyland [York Notes, 1982]
Songs of Innocence and of Experience by Alan Tomlinson [MacMillan Master
Guides, 1987]
Songs of Innocence and of Experience by David Punter [York Notes Advanced,
2003]
Songs of Innocence and Experience by Margaret Bottrall [MacMillan Casebook,
1970]
Romantic Literature by John Gilroy [York Notes Companions, 2010]
Companion to British Poetry: 19th Centuries by William Flesch [Facts on File, 2010]

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