“The TYGER”, is a poem by William Blake, an English poet who lived between eighteenth and nineteenth century. The poem is a lyric one which focuses on the creations of God. It is made of questions which addressed to “The Tyger” in order to know more about its creation. In the poem you don’t face any narrative movement because nothing else happens except the author questioning “The Tyger”.
The poem contains of six stanzas and each stanza contains four lines. In the poem you can also notice that each stanza contains two couplets which are pairs of rhyming lines. The rhyme of these stanzas is AABB and the poem is in trochaic tetrameter. Each line contains eight syllables and each pair of syllables is formed by a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. William Blake uses a lot of rhetorical questions and different figures of speech to make the poem more interesting.
In the first stanza, the first two lines show us that the poem is addressed to “The Tyger”. We can notice the repetition “Tyger, Tyger” not only in the first stanza but throughout the whole poem. It makes the poem more mysterious and makes the reader wonder who “The Tyger” is. In his poem “The Lamb”, the author uses the lamb to personify the innocent mankind and in this poem he does the same thing with the tiger. He uses “The Tyger” as a wild and mysterious animal to show that it is capable of good things and bad things. As we read the lines “burning bright, in the forest of the night”(1-2) we ask ourselves why the author would use such a metaphor for “The Tyger”. “Burning bright” is used as a description of the appearance of the tiger and as a description of the energy and the power that tigers have and they are capable of doing everything. Keeping in m...
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...s forest. There is a slight change that Blake made in the last line of the stanza. “What immortal hand or eye, dare frame thy fearful symmetry?”(23-24). Blake was asking in the first stanza what kind of God was that who created such a terrifying creature. In this stanza he used the word “dare” instead of “could” and now he is asking how God could dare to create such a terrifying creature with free will.
The message that Blake wants to give us by his poems “The Tyger” and “The Lamb” is that God is the one who created both the tiger and the lamb. Despite their major difference, God knew what he was doing. He created tiger (mankind) with free will, in order for it to be free and live happily. The stage of life presented in this poem is connected to the birth. “Birth is the beginning of a hero’s life”. They have a choice since they are born whether to be good or evil.
The opening stanzas from William Blake’s poem “The Tiger” in “The Child By Tiger” by Thomas Wolfe help accentuate the theme of the story. They further relate to the passage in which Dick Prosser’s bible was left open to. The stanzas incorporated in the story reveal that with every good is evil.
Compare and contrast the poems The Tyger and The Donkey and discuss which poet gives us the clearest depiction of humanity. William Blake is a wealthy, upper-class writer who separates himself from the rest of the wealthy community. Blake has a hate for the techniques used by many of the wealthy, company owners who gain and capitalise through cheap and expendable labour, supplied by the ever-growing poverty in the country. Blake makes a point to try and reveal this industrial savagery through his work. "The Tyger" is presented as a metaphorical approach to the struggle between the rich and the poor; good and evil.
Natoli, Joseph. "William Blake." Critical Survey Of Poetry, Second Revised Edition (2002): 1-12. Literary Reference Center. Web. 17 Jan. 2014.
Both of the questions being asked by Blake in each stanza are congruent with the five worldview questions. The five worldview questions are as follows: Who is God?, Who am I?, What’s the problem?, What’s the solution?, and Where are we going?. Furthermore, throughout the entire poem, each stanza asks a worldview question. So when Blake asks certain questions about the Tiger such as “What the hand, dare seize the fire?” (Blake 1) he is actually asking the reader; moreover, each question questions the reader’s thinking of religion. This consequently ties in with the major theme of the poem which is
This essay provides a Reader-Response based analysis of William Blake’s “The Tyger.” Following a brief overview of Reader-Response theory, where the subjects of the reader serve to give meaning to text, the essay begins focusing on the contradiction and the division that lives within the tiger itself. Blake’s “Tyger” is simultaneously a beautiful and ferocious creature. From this, the essay moves forward by examining the multiple references to symmetry made by Blake in “The Tyger,” and proposes that these are an overall collection that contains many of the tiger’s contradictions. Moving forward, the essay proposes, within the context of a secondary literature that debates the realism of Blake’s portrayal of the tiger, that while Blake does not represent an accurate tiger in his poem, this is largely irrelevant as the work is focused not on the tiger as an actual animal, but rather on the tiger as a myth of nature. With all of the above in mind, the essay concludes by noting that “The Tyger” is especially open to Reader-Response analyses because of its open-ended portrayal of the tiger as well as its openness to divergent interpretations.
William Blake’s 1793 poem “The Tyger” has many interpretations, but its main purpose is to question God as a creator. Its poetic techniques generate a vivid picture that encourages the reader to see the Tyger as a horrifying and terrible being. The speaker addresses the question of whether or not the same God who made the lamb, a gentle creature, could have also formed the Tyger and all its darkness. This issue is addressed through many poetic devices including rhyme, repetition, allusion, and symbolism, all of which show up throughout the poem and are combined to create a strong image of the Tyger and a less than thorough interpretation of its maker.
...sts of ten syllables. Blake’s poem differs in this way as it does not contain an iambic pentameter however, it does contain rhyming couplets, which are a very simple way to allow a poem to flow easily and make it enjoyable for the reader such as the lines:
Although Blake’s poem The Tyger revolved around the idea of a ferocious mammal, its illustration of a sheepish tiger complicates and alters Blake’s message in the poem by suggesting that good and evil simultaneously exist. Upon first reading the poem, without any influence from the illustration, the consistent use of harsh imagery paints an animal that is both fearful and wild. Creating an extended metaphor between the creator and a blacksmith, Blake poses the question “What is the hammer? What the chain, in what furnace was thy brain?
Could there be a creator that has the audacity to create one creature so pure, gentle, and innocent then, in turn, create another creature of a hideous nature, so terrifying that one could be driven to insanity just by thinking upon it? In William Blake’s poems “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” he describes such a creator as this. The reader will find that there are several similarities between the two poems, but in these similarities there are also various differences.
giving the tiger an even more awe-inspiring quality. The stanza finishes with "Did he who made the lamb make thee?" Which gives the idea of disbelief at the prospect of a creator making a harmless pleasant creature such as the lamb and a dangerous mighty and awful creature like the tiger. b) Explore the ways Blake uses imagery and repetition in this poem. The most obvious repetition in this poem is the "Tiger"!
The poem at first glance looks to be about a Tyger but after reading through
William Blake, a romantic poet in the late 1700s, wrote a collection of biblical poems, called The Songs of Innocence and Experience. In this collection, Blake wrote a six-stanza poem consisting almost entirely of questions, titled “The Tyger”. Blake addresses this “Tyger” throughout the entire poem, beginning by asking who or what immortal creature made the Tyger. Blake then describes the Tyger as a fearsome and evil creature and tries to understand how the person who made the Tyger could have continued the process once it’s horrible “heart began to beat” (Blake 11). He compares the creator of the animal to a blacksmith, asking if the creator used an anvil and hammer to create the creature or other tools. Towards the end of the poem, Blake
middle of paper ... ... Through symbolism and reference, Blake’s “The Tyger” effectively portrays civilized human existence. Although “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” appear to be fairly different in subject matter, both poems include a deep, indirect portrayal of Rousseau’s noble savage myth. Also, both poems include a variety of romantic ideals.
Thus the poem is a splendid pen picture of joys of child hood and their eventual fading away into eternity. Blake has further laid stress on the potent entity called ‘change’. The poet has through useful symbol of oak tree, old people, evening etc has discussed the mechanics, which act as a fulcrum in moving the paddles of life. The poet has showed superb mastery as he changes the mood of the poem along with the progression of the poem. The poem is in fact a very fine presentation of the philosophy of life resting on the hinges of the magnificent time.
William Blake’s The Tyger is reminiscent of when God questioned Job rhetorically about his creations, many of them being fearsome beasts such as the leviathan or the behemoth. Much like this speech from the old testament, The Tyger also uses a significant amount of imagery and symbolism which contributes to its spiritual aspects.