Desert Island Poems: 'The Tyger' by William Blake

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 seize 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 water'd 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?

This is such a deceptively simple poem. For me, it represents the highest form of poetry: a poem that can be recited by young and old. It can be read by a child as a poem about a tiger; it can be read by an academic as a poem criticising industrialisation. 

Form and Function

So many of these Desert Island Poems are underpinned by formal constraints, which makes me think more and more how canonical, long lasting, resonant poems are also poems which have been well-made, and well crafted, with no excess word, and usually with technical limitations placed upon them. The poems I’ve chosen so far speak of the benefits of form in poetry, and question the merits of a poem without any.

Rhythm and Rhyme

In this poem, Blake really goes to town with the rhythm and rhyme. The trochaic stresses in the first line or ‘Tyger, Tyger, burning bright’ mimic a banging hammer, striking an anvil again and again, or a banging in nail after nail. Poets are usually at pains to cover over the stresses in the rhythm of a line, in order to blend them in and not draw too much attention to them, but Blake on the other hand has really gone for it and instead these stresses drive the poem on and make its cadence so distinctive. The banging hammer of the stresses is no coincidence, though. Written at a time when industrialisation was taking hold of England, Blake opposed the growing industries and the ill effect they were having on society, as machines took the place of men working by hand - can you spot the parallels with our own time and AI? His other poems such as ‘London’ and ‘Chimney Sweeper’ and even ‘Jerusalem’ with its ‘dark, satanic mills’ gives us a sense of Blake’s opposition to this coming machine age. 

Interpretations

There are so many ways to interpret the tiger in this poem, but for me the big idea is Blake’s assertion that the machine age may think it’s mighty and powerful, but mother nature, represented fiercely in the tiger, is more powerful and beyond the grasp and reproduction of human ability; the poem is about the superiority of the natural world and how, no matter how many mills and factories we build, it will always be somehow beyond us. Blake does not commit to saying that God is the figure behind this creation, but he does pose the question that it might be him - ‘did he who made the lamb make thee?’ and ‘did he smile his work to see?’ There is a suggestion here that Blake is referring to God, but he never explicitly states that. A creator? Yes. God with a capital ‘G’? Blake manages to weave his way around acknowledging as much. There is also a sense that such a creator would have been taken aback by the creation as Blake questions ‘Did he smile his work to see?’ Blake is questioning whether anyone could have been pleased to create such a dangerous and terrifying creature. In this one line he manages to capture Edmund Burke’s ideas of the sublime (1757) in which he propounds his theory of the sublime being something that is at once terrifying but awe-inspiring, and Blake’s tiger fits this bill.  

Framing The Tyger

Like ‘Bright Star’ the poem is self-referential, in that it refers to its own making. When Blake refers to ‘What immortal hand or eye’ he’s really referring to himself, or the immortal hand of the poet. He’s written a poem about the impossibility of capturing a tiger in verse and his use of the word ‘frame’ is noteworthy, as it suggests a picture frame (we must remember Blake was a visual artist and illustrator as much as a poet, so this word would have held many meanings for him) but also suggests a sense of capture. Indeed, when we think of the quatrains of this poem, with the strident rhyming couplets, it’s like each one is a literally representing a frame of words, trying to capture the tiger. However, with Blake’s insistent questions, the tiger seems to elude the poet - Blake never seems sure about the real identity of the tiger, and the whole poem presents the reader (and it would seem, its writer) with question after question. Who is the tiger and who could possibly hope to capture it? Blake goes even further with this sense of uncertainty, though, which we see in the last line, when, after spending 24 lines deliberating the identity of the tiger, writes ‘dare frame thy fearful symmetry?’ So, it seems that Blake’s conclusion is that not only is he none the wiser about the tiger, but that he’s questioning his own audacity for even having attempted to ‘dare’ to capture the tiger. This irony, though, is slightly disingenuous as in writing about his audacity to capture the amazing features of the tiger, he has written the most defining poem about a tiger we have in the canon. It’s a great irony, though, that the most memorable poem we have in the English language about a tiger is one which is essentially concerned with its elusiveness and the impossibility of portraying such a creature in words. For these reasons alone, there is more about this poem about a tiger than meets the eye. 

Hammers, chains and brains

My favourite two lines in this poem are:

What the hammer? what the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?

The questioning aspect of this poem is so important - at no point does Blake assert his own opinion in this poem - he simply asks questions and in doing so assumes the role of a detached observer posing questions to the reader and, in turn, society. This removal of the poet’s own bias and opinion is what makes the poem so striking as it allows room for the reader to step in and make their own mind up about nature v humanity. Nowhere is this seen more vividly, I’d argue than in these two lines. First of all, we have the succinct, curt ‘What the hammer? What the chain?’ Many poets would have written something like ‘What hammer forged the tiger’s brain?’ But the formal constraints Blake is working within make him more inventive than that, and so we’re left with these iconic, intriguing short questions: ‘What the hammer?’ What does he mean by these questions? Well, I think he’s trying to say what kind of hammer or chain or furnace could have created such a creature as awe-inspiring and terrifying as the tiger. And I think we can assume that for Blake, the answer is there is no furnace or chain or hammer that could have produced this animal - it is, in effect, beyond the creation of a human. 

On Eye/Symmetry

I want to finish by exploring the final rhyming couple, if we can call it that, as so much rides on our interpretation of whether these words rhyme or not. In modern English, ‘eye’ and ‘symmetry’ just don’t rhyme. So, from a modern viewpoint we could say that Blake uses this off-rhyme to convey the poet’s inability to capture the symmetry of the tiger, which answers the question that he’s asking. So when he’s asking ‘what immortal hand or eye/ dare frame thy fearful symmetry?’ Well, he’s answering his own question, as he has failed to capture it, as seen in his failure to rhyme the final two words. This points to a wider concern of his: human’s inability to create as well as an almighty creator, the ‘he’ referred to at the end of the penultimate quatrain. However, if we do take the words to rhyme (‘eye’ with ‘symmetry’) which some academics do believe would have been the case in Blake’s time, it would mean that the poet has been able to, or least tried to capture the symmetry of the tiger, and that the human has framed, trapped the animal in a poem, alluding to the corrupting power humans have over the natural world, as we frame the natural world for our pleasure, unable to let it run free. It also speaks to the power and skill of the poet, and how poetry is powerful art form that has the capacity to ‘dare’ and be active in a rapidly industrialising world. So, these, as far as I’m concerned are the two ways we could interpret the ending.

Another way to read it?

However, there is one more way of looking at it. I’d argue that it’s not the rhyme that’s important here, but the rhythm and the stress. In the noun ‘symmetry’ the stress is on the ‘symm’ and then the word dies away with unstressed syllables, or you could say a soft, very light stress on the ‘try’ - therefore even if the word did rhyme, Blake undermines this rhyme with a quietening of the word, or powering down of the language, almost signalling the poet’s defeat in trying to capture the majesty of this animal. These ambiguities, as opposed to stifling the poem or lending it a sense of anticlimax, help to keep the poem alive.

Lessons from the Master

What we can learn most about this poem, in the same way we can learn from poets such as Robert Frost, is that it’s easier to take a simple (almost child-like image) and from that build complexity through imagery. And that when this is coupled with a skilled, formal approach, the result is something more than the sum of its parts, and what’s more, a poem for the ages.