Tyger by William Blake

1936 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Sonnet 138 importance

Poetry is greatly influenced by issues like evil, pain, and human suffering that do not have a literal answer for why they occur. They are often pinpointed by writers as they find its origin or lay the blame through a wide range of poetic devices that cause the reader to question their own beliefs and morals. In the poem ‘Tyger’, William Blake tries to divulge the creation of adversity by asking a series of blatant questions “What immortal hand or eye… frame thy fearful symmetry?” In addition to this, the origin of suffering is again interrogated by William Blake in his poem ‘Poison Tree’, as he explores how unaddressed, cultivated “wrath” can lead to destructive behavior which results in both personal and others misfortune. Both ‘Sonnet 116’ and ‘Valentine’ written by William Shakespeare and Carol Ann Duffy express the side of heartbreak and love that is not often focused upon. These poems incorporate strong feelings about the definition of true love, explaining how love is an “ever fixed mark” and not a “red rose”. The poem ‘War Photographer’, by Carol Ann Duffy, portrays emotional personal suffering as well as comparing it to the ignorance of others as “Sunday’s supplement”. ‘Children in the Darkness’ is a poem, written by Henry M. Bechtold that directly addresses human suffering and what can be done to change the suffering people face every day.
William Blake and his poem “The Tyger,” questions human suffering and its creation. Blake uses a tiger as an extended metaphor, which takes on the role of a symbolic character and embodies the spiritual and moral problem that evolves to become the symbolic centre for an investigation about the origin and presence of evil and suffering in the world. The tiger is a dreadful creature w...

... middle of paper ...

... all chances of hope have been destroyed by war.

The poets of the discussed poems are each greatly influenced by suffering. They have each outlined either the cause or result of suffering, and drawn their conclusion from one of their own belief or morals. For example; ‘Valentine’ and ‘Sonnet 116’ are greatly related, due to their authors morals that have been attributed to the poems. ‘The Tyger’ is influenced largely from William Blake’s beliefs in origin. ‘War Photographer’ is an example of a poem that has contributed the result of suffering and ‘Poison Tree’ has outlined the cause of suffering. This has occurred through a wide range of poetic devices that made the reader to question their own beliefs or morals. Suffering is an often deeply discussed topic, which is continued to be used in literature in many ways today.

Works Cited

http://www.sparknotes.com/

Show More
Related

  • Compare Antigone And The Bible

    762 Words  | 2 Pages

    Despite its prevalence, suffering is always seen an intrusion, a personal attack on its victims. However, without its presence, there would never be anyway to differentiate between happiness and sadness, nor good and evil. It is encoded into the daily lives people lead, and cannot be avoided, much like the prophecies described in Antigone. Upon finding out that he’d murdered his father and married his mother,

    Read More

  • Blake's View on Oppression of Children by Adults

    1171 Words  | 3 Pages

    But the ‘Nurses Song,’ form experience shows the reality of life: that it is hard, and people, like the nurse in the song aren’t happy and full of joy, like the memories of the old people in ‘The Echoing Green,’ and therefore, Blake’s poetry confirms the view that children are oppressed by

    Read More

  • Child By Tiger

    366 Words  | 1 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • The Irish Potato Famine and The Holocaust in Literature

    5650 Words  | 12 Pages

    Writers often use literature as a means of communicating traumatic events that occur in history, and such events are recorded by first-hand accounts as well as remembered by people far removed from the situation. Two traumatic events in history that are readily found in literature are The Irish Potato Famine and The Holocaust. A literary medium that has been used quite poignantly to convey trauma is poetry and the poetry from these two historical traumatic events is not difficult to find. Some wrote poetry to maintain their sanity as they experienced the traumatic event while others wrote after-the-fact as an outlet for emotional pain. Some wrote in remembrance of what they had lived through and so that others in succeeding generations could fathom even a glimpse of their traumatic experience. Another group of writers, far removed from the events, felt they had some light to shed on the subject. These people may be from a background similar to the victims or very learned on the matter surrounding it. A reader may wonder why poetry is such a viable option for conveying the trauma of so many people. Hilda Schiff writes, “the contemporaneous literature of any period of history is not only an integral part of that period, but it also allows us to understand historical events and experiences better than the bare facts alone can do because they enable us to absorb them inwardly” (xiv). The facts are raw and bare, like a skeleton. The literature and poetry add the skin and features to the bones to make the people and images they represent more realistic.

    Read More

  • Sorrow Of Sorrow

    996 Words  | 2 Pages

    During the process of growing up, we are taught to believe that life is relatively colorful and rich; however, if this view is right, how can we explain why literature illustrates the negative and painful feeling of life? Thus, sorrow is inescapable; as it increase one cannot hide it. From the moment we are born into the world, people suffer from different kinds of sorrow. Even though we believe there are so many happy things around us, these things are heartbreaking. The poems “Tips from My Father” by Carol Ann Davis, “Not Waving but Drowning” by Stevie Smith, and “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop convey the sorrow about growing up, about sorrowful pretending, and even about life itself.

    Read More

  • The Mental Traveller by William Blake

    1708 Words  | 4 Pages

    William Blake is a literature genius. Most of his work speaks volume to the readers. Blake’s poem “The Mental Traveller” features a conflict between a male and female that all readers can relate to because of the lessons learned as you read. The poet William Blake isn’t just known for just writing. He was also a well-known painter and a printmaker. Blake is considered a seminal figure in the history of poetry. His poems are from the Romantic age (The end of the 18th Century). He was born in Soho, London, Great Britain. He was the third of seven children. Even though Blake was such an inspiration as a writer he only went to school just enough to read and write. According to Bloom’s critical views on William Blake; one of Blake’s inspirations was the Bible because he believed and belonged to the Moravian Church.

    Read More

  • Juxtaposition In Medea

    654 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the poem written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning , the author brings to the attention of the reader that children are suffering during her generation because of child labor .She uses quotes ,juxtapositions, simile and she even uses the reference to the Christian religion in way to bring sympathy for the children .

    Read More

  • Figurative Language In I Go Back To May 1937

    982 Words  | 2 Pages

    Through diction, the tone of the poem is developed as one that is downtrodden and regretful, while at the same time informative for those who hear her story. Phrases such as, “you are going to do bad things to children…,” “you are going to suffer… ,” and “her pitiful beautiful untouched body…” depict the tone of the speaker as desperate for wanting to stop her parents. Olds wrote many poems that contained a speaker who is contemplating the past of both her life and her parent’s life. In the poem “The Victims,” the speaker is again trying to find acceptance in the divorce and avoidance of her father, “When Mother divorced you, we were glad/ … She kicked you out, suddenly, and her/ kids loved it… ” (Olds 990). Through the remorseful and gloomy tone, we see that the speaker in both poems struggles with a relationship between her parents, and is also struggling to understand the pain of her

    Read More

  • Comparing Tigers

    901 Words  | 2 Pages

    This is the first stanza of William Blake's famous poem, "The Tyger" which is also featured as the opening paragraph in "The Child by Tiger", a short story by Thomas Wolfe. In the narrative, a seemingly kind, gentle, and religious African American male named Dick Prosser goes on a vicious rampage after drinking excessively and getting in a fight with his love interest's husband (Wolfe 735). At the end of the story, a large mob made up of vengeful White people seeking justice against the "crazed Negro" tracks him down to a riverbank, where Dick awaits them with his shoes at his side and a firearm squeezed dry of ammunition (739). His stalkers gun him down, hang his lifeless body from a tree, pump him full of 300 bullets, and take his mutilated corpse back to down where he is hung in an undertaker's display window for all to see and enjoy (739). What one may not realize while begin to read this story, is that the excerpt from the Blake poem that precedes the tale actually foreshadows the theme. The tiger spoken of in the poem represents the beast that is inside all men. When provoked, a tiger can mutilate and destroy another creature, much like how Dick Prosser's character lashes out and drops bodies all over town with a repeating rifle and hundreds of rounds of bullets (735). "The Child by Tiger" serves as an example that one can only be pushed so far and be put through so much insignificant mental and physical torment before they snap and fight back against their demeaning community.

    Read More

  • The Structure And Diction In 'After Great Pain' By Emily Dickinson

    1064 Words  | 3 Pages

    The poem, “After Great Pain”, by Emily Dickinson, is one that conveys an inner struggle of emotion and the process that a person goes through after experiencing suffering or pain. Through this poem, Dickinson utilizes physical reactions to allude to the emotional pain that can make people feel numb and empty. Included in this poem is an array of literary devices, such as oxymorons, similes, and personification. These devices help show how death and grief can be confronted, whether it be by giving into the pain or by regaining emotional strength, letting go, and moving on with life. As we work on the project, we discuss multiple aspects of the poem and how the structure and diction alludes the meaning of the poem.

    Read More

  • Analysis of William Blake's A Poison Tree

    522 Words  | 2 Pages

    In “A Poison Tree,” by William Blake is a central metaphor explains a truth of human nature. The opening stanza sets up everything for the entire poem, from the ending of anger with the “friend,” to the continuing anger with the “foe.” Blake startles the reader with the clarity of the poem, and with metaphors that can apply to many instances of life.

    Read More

  • Elegy Written in a Church Courtyard by Thomas Grey

    1152 Words  | 3 Pages

    Poetry can serve as cautionary tales, a declaration of love and many other types of expression. Poems can discuss several themes from love and life to death and religion; however two poems with the same themes can have two different messages. Thomas Grey’s “Elegy Written in a Church Courtyard” and “Beowulf” author unknown, express themes such as death and the value of life; however their use of figurative language and choice of form convey two different messages. Figurative language can deepen the meaning of a message, while form can give the reader a hint about the poem’s theme.

    Read More

  • A Reader-Response Based Analysis of William Blake's "The Tyger"

    1286 Words  | 3 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Themes Of Innocence In William Blake's The Tyger

    1150 Words  | 3 Pages

    There are often two sides to everything: chocolate and vanilla, water and fire, woman and man, innocence and experience. The presence of two opposing items allows for harmony and balance in the world. Without water, fire cannot be put out and without woman there can be no man. William Blake’s poetry collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience draws parallels between poems of “innocence” and poems of “experience”. His poem The Lamb is mirrored by his poem The Tyger.

    Read More

  • The Lamb vs. The Tyger By William Blake

    1087 Words  | 3 Pages

    In this essay I am going to be looking at two poems from the Songs of innocence and experience works. These poems are The Lamb and The Tyger written by William Blake. Both these poems have many underlying meanings and are cryptic in ways and both poems are very different to each other. In this essay I will be analysing the two poems, showing my opinions of the underlying themes and backing them up with quotes from the poems. I will compare the poems looking at the similarities and differences between them and also look at each one individually focusing on the imagery, structure and the poetic devices William Blake has used. Firstly I will look at the Tyger a poem about experience.

    Read More

More about Tyger by William Blake

Open Document