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.
- especially since the 1880s.

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) and our knowledge of suffering and death.
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
Joy11 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 cleansed12 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?
- the infant in ‘Cradle Song’ is explicitly associated with the baby Jesus.

This baby is the perfect innocent who, when left alone to determine its own
nature (the baby names herself), find joy rather than13 guilt14 or
repression within.

The infant is the embodiment15 of innocent happiness

but she needs succour and reassurance
both verbal (“Sweet joy befall thee!”) and
non-verbal (euphony of the song and poetry).
11 ‘Joy’ is, via Latin jocus (= joke, fun), related to joya, juego and ‘joke’.
12 to cleanse – purify
13 rather than – as opposed to, instead of
14 guilt – culpability
15 embodiment – personification, incarnation, incorporation
Here she receives both from the narrator.

Is this joyous innocent simply the lack of16 cruel experience of the world?
Is it possible to maintain a childlike innocence throughout17 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?

Clearly, the dialogue between a mother and a two-day-old baby is

fanciful18
- ‘infant’ comes Latin from infans (= unable to speak).
- however, Blake is suggesting that they can effectively communicate
without language (though sounds, song and love).

Once joy is spontaneously provoked it is a dynamic: happiness is produced

in one and conveyed to another.
- smiling is contagious

There is harmony in that the child names itself and then the mother
confirms its name.

16 lack of – absence of
17 throughout – during all of
18 fanciful – unrealistic, imaginary
Beyond Meaning

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.
- the limited lexical field reflecting limited experience.

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.

The diminutive poem represents the diminutive person.

- the two halves of the poem mirror the union of mother and child.

Do the sestets rhyming ABCDDC reflect a cradle rocking

- could there be a relationship with the contemporary cradle song/nursery
rhyme “Rock-a-bye Baby”?
The Image

The image is, as usual, dynamically

ambiguous.
- birth is connected with green
nature through the image of the
mother and child appearing in being
revealed within the flower of a
blossoming plant.
- But at the same time the aurora and
the petals constitute a strong image
of fire burning in the surrounding
darkness.
- the scale is that of fairies – and the
image reminds one of Victorian
fairy painting – but it also iconically
echoes images of the Annunciation
and the Madonna and child.
- notice how the wings are drawn and
coloured in such a way that they can
be interpreted as little fairy wings or
long angel wings!

In ‘A Cradle Song’ in Songs of

Innocence specifically associated a contemporary mother and child with
Mary and the Christ child.
- but that poem recognizes that to be born is to go on to suffer and to die.
The baby might have Christ-like innocence but he or she is also destined
to be destroyed by the world, like Christ was.

The cover illustration of Songs of Innocence & Experience shows the Fall.
- If parents don’t allow their children to go out into the world and,
inevitably, be betrayed and tortured and die, then they never grow up and
become emotionally stunted.

The central tragedy of motherhood is that you cannot prevent the suffering
of one’s child.
- We know that Madonna and Child image gives way to the Pietà. Indeed,
the baby is reclining on the mother’s lap in a Pietà position.

Notice that pathetic fallacy of the illustration, with the lighting suggesting
dawn.
The Blank Slate

The infant is initially free of societal labels and restrictions

- she is an embodiment of Rousseau’s ‘blank slate’.
- Rousseau also said that children were born intrinsically good.

Does the mother’s blessing implicitly acknowledge that she has brought a
child into a world of suffering and death?
- she knows that in some respects “it’s all downhill from here!”

The reader knows that the state of symbiotic harmony between mother and
infant will not last.

Dies Lustricus

In Roman culture naming was an important part of the dies lustricus (= day
of purification)
- according to Plutarch the baby was considered “more like a plant than an
animal” until this day when the baby was definitively considered a
separate being from the mother; an individual with his or her own fate.
The dies lustricus was as important as the birth itself.
 Infant Sorrow

My mother groaned, my father wept,

Into the dangerous world I leapt;
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend19 hid in a cloud. pararhyme

Struggling in my father’s hands,

Striving against my swaddling bands,
Bound and weary, I thought best alliteration
To sulk20 upon my mother’s breast. assonance

The Title

Again is this:
the sorrow21 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 into22 hypocritical sulking.

19 fiend – demon, devil, enemy

20 to sulk – be resentfully silent
21 sorrow – sadness, unhappiness
22 to settle down into – adopt a stable state of
The First Verse

The mother experiences the pain of childbirth and the father weeps at the
responsibility.
- the unwanted child is a product of joylessness and its mother’s pain
- leaving the womb is a fall from paradise.

His negative experience of the world leads to23 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 chance24 of escaping.

The Second Verse

The second verse reflects resignation at the fact that the child cannot resist
the control of its parents.

Finally the infant capitulates, persuaded by developing reason that survival

lies in accommodating oneself to the powers that be, even though such
capitulation can only produce a life of frustration. The child is fed, but at
the price of being swaddled and of ‘sulking’.
- The lively child has given way to a tired, world-weary infant in mere
moments.

There is the suggestion of conflict and competition between baby and

father for the mother’s attention.

Almost immediately, the child learns that resistance is futile.

- it relinquishes its energy, its life-force.

This is the birth of a representative citizen of Blake’s London. It is already

in the process of forging its own mental manacles. It can look forward to a
life in which “Love! sweet Love! [will be] thought a crime”25.26
23 to lead to (lead-led-led) – provoke, cause
24 chance – possibility
25 from ‘A Little Girl Lost’
26 Wolf Mankowitz, Politics and Letters (1947)
Stylistics

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 rigid rhyme scheme reflects the restrictive swaddling.

Notice the howling effect of /au/

Notice the subtle shift from the expected ‘suck’ to ‘sulk’.

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 draft27 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.

27 draft – preliminary version

The Illustration

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”.

The text would lead us to expect any

of the following as possible
illustrations:
- an image of childbirth with the
father present;
- a swaddled child held by a man;
- a swaddled child being nursed or
held close to a woman's breast;
- even perhaps a child in a cloud as in
the frontispiece to Songs of
Innocence.
But the actual design offers none of
the expected illustrative elements.
There is no moment of birth,
such as Blake portrayed in plate
3 of The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell, where the child emerges
from its mother's womb.

Nor is a woman even present in the bed behind the wicker crib on which
the child rests.
The child is not swaddled, and no male figure appears.
Nor is there any certain visual identification of the woman
as the child’s mother; she could as easily be its nurse. Her
garb does not distinguish her from the nurse in Blake’s
“Nurse’s Song” in Songs of Innocence.28

Verbal vs. Visual Codes

‘Infant Sorrow’ presents the theoretical possibility of the non-dependency

and non-unification of the verbal and visual codes.

In ‘Infant Sorrow’ (and perhaps in other illuminated poems created during

the initial phases of the French Revolution, such as ‘The Tyger’), Blake
explores the possibility that the two art forms may neither conflict nor
interact.29

Swaddling

Notice the importance of ‘bound’ implying restriction, limitation and

obligation.

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

Although swaddling had been condemned by Locke, Richardson, and many

physicians, it faded slowly as a social custom, and the practice continued in
France and England throughout the period. The association of swaddling
with bondage was forcefully articulated in Rousseau’s Emile:
The child has hardly left the mother's womb, it has hardly begun to
move and stretch its limbs, when it is deprived of its freedom. It is
wrapped in swaddling bands... they find every necessary movement
hampered; more miserable than a galley slave, in vain they struggle,
they become angry, they cry...

28
Bender and Mellor, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2872818
29 Bender and Mellor, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2872818
The Fiend in a Cloud

The infant 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.

‘Fiend’ implied an expression of pure energy in Blake’s day, so possibly

the newborn is being compared to lightning (notice the energy in ‘leapt’).
- but of course there is also the idea of ‘devil, ‘monster’, ‘embodiment of
hatred’

Blake makes clear in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, to the eyes of the
rational and repressed, naked energy seems hellish, sinful.

The child is merely likened to a fiend, not defined as the devil. Since
calculating thought is inherently suspect in The Songs of Experience, the
speaker’s insistence that it is “best / To sulk upon [its] mother’s breast” has
to be taken as irony and its speech considered unreliable. There is, then, no
fully resolvable way to read ‘Infant Sorrow’, since a “correct”
interpretation has to recognize and embody contradiction: the child is and is
not bound; the infant is and is not a “fiend”; it is and is not “best” for the
child to accommodate itself to authority. Blake’s verbal irony here works to
discount the literal meaning of the surface text, without implying a clear
alternative verbal or visual authority... In the interplay of visual and verbal
text that it presents, this work is an example of romantic irony-of
juxtaposed epistemological systems that de-create their own authority.30

30 Bender and Mellor, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2872818

The Dead Mother

Death is often conceived of as coming in a dark cloud (Statius, Homer,

Spenser, Shakespeare – [3HVI 2.6.62])
Similarly, grief and sorrow come in a cloud in Homer (“the dark cloud of
sorrow” – Iliad 17.591), Ovid and Chaucer.

Could the mother have died in childbirth? “My mother groaned, my father
wept...”
- the voice of the mother is now absent.

Death in childbirth is important in Blake’s work

- for example, the mother’s death in ‘A Chimney Sweeper’
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry “weep! weep! weep! weep!”
- you should be able to spot the lexical parallels.

We could interpret the illustration as showing a well-furnished bedroom in

which a maid rushing to restrain the child while it reaches up towards the
empty double bed where its mother should be.

The Infant Pair

I have just spent over 2000 words talking about two poems: one of 50
words, the other of 45 words.

The two ‘infant poems’ are giving voice to the voiceless.

- a frequent aim of Blake’s.

Ultimately31, the paired poems show how the same event can be
experienced as traumatic and life-threatening of a joyous miracle.
- both perspectives are justified, it just depends on one’s time reference and
mindfulness.

31 ultimately – (false friend) in the final analysis

The first draft of the poem continued on for another seven verses:

When I saw that rage was vain

10 And to sulk would nothing gain
Turning many a trick or wile
I began to soothe & smile

And I grew day after day

Till upon the ground I stray
15 And I grew night after night
Seeking only for delight

And I saw before me shine

Clusters of the wandring vine
And beyond a mirtle tree
20 Stretchd its blossoms out to me

But a Priest [My Father] with holy look

In his hand a holy book
Pronouncd curses on his head
Who the fruit or blossoms shed

25 I beheld the Priest by night

He embracd my mirtle32 bright
I beheld the Priest by day
Where beneath my vine he lay

Like a serpent in the night

30 He embracd my mirtle bright
Like a serpent in the day
Underneath my vine he lay

So I smote him & his gore

Staind the roots my mirtle bore
35 But the time of youth is fled
And grey hairs are on my head

The original poem traced the development of the newborn infant through
adolescent desire to a frustration by and rebellion against a repressive
father figure that ends only in an exhausted old age. By publishing only the
first two stanzas, Blake emphasized the revolutionary moment when
liberated energy is born into the oppressed world depicted in The Songs of
Experience.33

32 mirtle – (Myrtus communis) a plant sacred to Aphrodite/Venus; Aristophanes uses it as a euphemism for female
genitalia.
33 Bender and Mellor, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2872818
 The Tyger

Tyger34! 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 deeps35 or skies assonance, alliteration

Burnt the fire of thine eyes? assonance
On what wings dare he aspire36?37
What the hand dare sieze38 the fire?39

And what shoulder40, & what art,

Could twist the sinews41 of thy heart? assonance, iambic tetrameter
42
And when thy heart began to beat, pararhyme, iambic tetrameter
43 44
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 spears45, 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

34 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)
35 a possible reference to Ovid, “the Tyger fierce was borne upon the deep” [Metamorphoses, 1, 156]
36 to aspire – a. rise up, b. have a burning ambition
37 a reference to Icarus?
38 Blake’s spelling of ‘seize’
39 the hand that dare seize the fire could be a reference to Prometheus
40 shoulder – (in this case) strength
41 sinews – muscles, tendons
42 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]
43 dread – fearful. terrified
44 dread – fearsome, terrifying
45 threw down their spears – a. abandon one’s weapons. b. defend oneself from on high
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’ /əi/ in Blake’s Early Modern
English).

Notice that the poem is made up entirely of46 questions.

Semantic Field

The Lexical set is revealing. There are four interrelated subsets:

1. The Natural Macrocosm: forest, night, deeps, skies, heaven, stars,
which augments the majestic scale of the Tyger.
2. The Corporal: Hand (x2), eye, eyes, wings, shoulder, sinews, heart
(x2), feet, brain and smile, which emphasize the physicality and vitality
of the Tyger.
3. Combustion: burning, burnt, fire (x2) furnace. In the Qur’an Eblis (=
Satan) refuses to prostrate himself before Adam saying “How can I
prostrate? I am made of fire and this Adam is made of earth. I am a
higher and more sublime element than earth.”
4. Metalwork: hammer, chain, furnace, anvil, suggesting the Tyger’s
invincibility. However, iron Hesiod predicted that those of the Iron Age –
the race now on earth – “will never cease from toil and misery by day or
night” and that Zeus would eventually destroy them /us.

46 to be made up of – be composed of
Ambiguity

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 instance47, ‘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’48 could mean

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

In what distant deeps or skies burnt the fires of thine eyes?

- the tiger’s glare is being compared to either gemstones (underground) or
stars in the night sky.
The question of whether the tiger was created in hell or heaven is still open.

Is the poem asking about the nature of the god who has made such a
beautiful, deadly49 beast?

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

47 for instance – for example

48 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.
49 deadly – lethal
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.
- more over the symbolic throwing down of weapons and weeping is
reminiscent of the symbolic descriptions of the surrender and repentance
of kings in both The French Revolution (1791) and America (1793).
- Moreover, the stars/spears line in The Tyger echoes Milton’s description
of the rebel angels:
...they astonished all resistance lost
All courage; down their idle weapons dropped

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.
References to Classical Mythology

On what wings did he aspire?

- possibly relating to the Icarus myth. But it could also refer to Satan.

What the hand dare seize the fire?

- relates to the Prometheus myth.

These are references to more or less reckless risk-taking.

Sinews (= tendons) were used to make archery bows.

Does the creator have responsibility for what his or her creation does?

The metalworking verse seems to evoke the god Hephaestus/Vulcan, the

god of metalworking.
- his symbols were the hammer and the anvil.
- he built metal automatons to work for him.
- according to some myths, Prometheus stole fire from Hephastus’s forge.
- Hephaestus created Pandora and gave her to mankind (and we all know
where that led?)
- He made gold and silver lions (and dogs) that protected the palace of
Alkinoos.

The Greeks believed that statues were somehow alive or had the potential
to come alive.
- from this perspective a manmade image of a tiger is something that can
petrify us. In other words a statue that can come alive and turn us into
stone (the literal meaning of ‘petrify’50).

Hesoid tells us that Hera engendered Hephaestus alone

- an alternative virgin birth to the Christian story.
- Hephaestus was expelled from Olympus because of his deformed foot. An
alternative to Satan’s fall in Paradise Lost.

The tiger was also associated with Dionysus/Bacchus

50 Notice that ‘dare’ in Early Modern English also meant ‘paralyze with fear’.
Literary Tigers

In Ars Poetica Horace, when discussing artistic incongruity, mentions the

pairing of “lambs with tigers” (i.e. the linking of wild with the tame).

Chaucer and Spenser associate tigers with cruelty.

Notice the possible reference to Henry V:

Then imitate the action of the51 tiger;
Stiffen the sinews52, summon up the blood

Shakespeare (in King Lear) associates tigers with non-filial behaviour:

Albany: What have you done? Tigers, not daughters
- that phrase “What have you done?” seems to echo through Blake’s poem.

Macbeth challenges Banquo’s ghost to become a “Hyrcan tiger” (i.e. tiger

from northern Iran) so that he can fight it.

Blake seems to be answering a 1728 poem by Henry Needler, in which he

celebrates the perfection of the human body as proof of “An infinite
Almighty God”:
By what artful Hand
Was the nice Fabrick made? Who plac’d the Bones
In such a well-knit Frame, and with such skill
And Symmetry contriv’d?

51 imitate the action of the – act like a

52 stiffen the sinews – gather your courage
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 wrath53 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”.

Ultimately54, 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

53 wrath – fury, anger

54 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.
- The Sporting Magazine of July 1793 stated that, “it is generally supposed
that [the tiger] prefers human flesh to that of any other animal. The tiger
is, indeed, one of the few animals whose ferocity can never be subdued.
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.
In dreams tigers in the jungle are said to represent repressed yet
uncontrollable urges and instinctive impulses.
Theodicy55

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?

Having said that, the tiger cannot be considered evil because it is just being
a tiger; evil requires voluntarism (choice) and lack of necessity.

Notice that if the creator of the Tyger is God (i.e. the Christian divinity), he
is not given the conventional capitalized personal pronouns (‘He’, ‘His’).

The speaker stands in awe56 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 might57
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.
55 theodicy – the problem of the existence of evil in a world created by a benevolent, omnipotent God.
56 in awe – astonished, amazed, dumbstruck
57 might – power
Notice however the false dichotomy: the Lamb may represent the
benevolent God but how does the Tyger represent the retribution of a just
God?

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?

Blake understood that nothing exists without its binary opposite

- so ‘bright’ rhymes with ‘night’ and a divine creator could not great
innocence (the lamb) without threatening experience (the Tyger).
- similarly, there are no ‘skies’ without ‘deeps’

If the lamb is a symbol of sacrifice (Cf. Christ) what is the Tyger a symbol
of...? Revenge?

The tiger is Blake’s symbol for the fierce forces in the soul which are
needed to break the bonds of experience. The forest of the night’, in which
the tiger lurks, are ignorance, repression, and superstition. [...] When the
lamb is destroyed by experience, the tiger is needed to restore the world.58

58 C.M. Bowra, The Romantic Imagination (1950)

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 seems clearly paired with the ‘song of innocence’ The
Lamb.

However, while the reference to the lamb may be a reference to Agnus dei,
it could also simply be a reference to the standard contrast at the time
between the tiger as the most untameable of animals and the lamb, the most
wholly dependent on humans to survive.

The innocent sacrificial lamb is a symbol of God’s love.

In this context, the Tyger seems to be a symbol of God’s wrath59
- 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 “A Island in the Moon” (1887) Blake wrote of “that noble beast the
Tyger”.

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 spreads60

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...

59 wrath – fury, anger

60 to spread (spread-spread-spread) – propagate
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?

Ultimately61, The Tyger is a great example of T S Eliot’s claim that

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

61 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 Weir62 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.
- Tipu Sultan famously said that he would rather live two days like a tiger
than two hundred years living like a sheep.
- 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.

Throughout southern Asia the tiger is considered part of a rite of passage

- initiates were taken into the jungle to face their fears and where they
would be symbolically killed by the tiger and reborn.

62 in Brahma in the West: William Blake and the Oriental Renaissance (2003)
The Tyger & Infant Sorrow

You might think that the infant poems are the natural pair but there are also
connections between the last two poems in terms of Blake’s mysticism,
alchemical philosophy.

Blake’s ‘frowning Babe’, the Messiah of the New Age, comes from the
Abyss. His name is ‘Orc’63 from Orcus (= Hell).

Indeed, a fuller quote from Urizen64 in The Four Zoas is:

... I hid myself in black clouds of my wrath:
I called the stars around my feet in the night of councils dark;
The stars threw down their spears and fled naked away.
- The first line is reminiscent of ‘Infant Sorrow’, while the very next line is
similar to one in ‘The Tyger’, as we have said.

63
Orc is the opposite of Urizen in Blake’s mythology. He is the embodiment of rebellion and
freedom
64
Urizen is the god of conventional reason, law, tradition and constraint in Blake’s mythology
 Extension

Find out about Tipu’s Tiger (a.k.a.65 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?

65 a.k.a. – also known as

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?

Does the repetition of ‘what’ echo the blows of the blacksmith’s hammer?

The poem 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.

EXTENSION

Listen to the wonderful Helen Mirren reading ‘The Tyger’ at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHRJwIYexKY&list=WL&index=143

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]
Liberating the Sister Arts: The Revolution of Blake’s ‘Infant Sorrow’ by John
Bender and Anne Mellor [Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983]

INTERNET

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