THE COMPLETE IEB POETRY RESOURCE
ANALYSIS
INTRODUCTION
TO POETRY
As has been discussed, the Renaissance represented a cultural and social revolution in Western thought. This revolution
began when Copernicus claimed that the Earth was not the centre of the universe, an assertion that was regarded as
heretical because a geocentric universe (which has the Earth and, by extension, humanity as its centre) was fundamental
to many doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. Questioning these doctrines led contemporary thinkers to challenge
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the Church’s dominant role in the politics of the day.
These formerly heretical ideas had taken hold of the European imagination by the late eighteenth century, when
British poet William Blake and his fellow Romantics wrote. Many of these poets no longer subscribed to a formal or
institutionalised religion, but recognised a vast spiritual power in the natural world and even in the depth of the human
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imagination. Both of these ideas are evident in Blake’s powerful “The Tyger”, which was first published in 1794 as part
of the illustrated volume Songs of Experience.
“The Tyger” poses a question that has intrigued scholars for centuries. Referring to a tiger, the speaker asks: ‘What
immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?’ (lines 3–4). Read literally, this question asks what type of
VICTORIAN
AND GOTHIC
deity could conceptualise a creature like the tiger. The speaker’s basic assumption is that the nature of this beast could
tell us something about the nature of its Creator, much as we expect a poem like this to tell us something about the poet.
Read in isolation, the first stanza is deceptively naive, for example, the description ‘burning bright’ (line 1) has positive
connotations of starlight, perhaps, or a cheerful bonfire, and is used to refer to the orange of the tiger’s coat. The only
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MODERNIST
hint of the violent threat the tiger represents, is the adjective ‘fearful’ (line 4).
As the speaker’s question and the metaphor of fire are developed over the next three stanzas, the beast’s capacity for
violence becomes clear. In stanza two, the speaker wonders whether the fire of the tiger’s eyes comes from hell, the
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MODERNIST
‘distant deeps’ or heaven, the ‘skies’ (line 5). In stanza
four, the speaker suggests that the tiger’s brain was
forged in a blacksmith’s fire. The tension of these lines
is heightened by the repetition of the word ‘what’, a
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poetic device known as anaphora.
The metaphor of fire is effective because it refers to the
colour of the tiger’s coat. It is also effective because
the nature of fire is essentially contradictory. Fire can
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POST-APARTHEID
be both a creative element and a destructive force. It is
the element at the centre of humankind’s survival and
development, as well as a force which can easily run out of control and burn down an entire city. This dichotomy is
further complicated by the fact that fire can purify and even create through destruction, as new vegetation grows after
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a veld fire.
The implicit contradiction of the metaphor is made explicit in the fifth stanza. The speaker describes how the Creator
smiles even as the heavens cry before asking: ‘Did He who made the Lamb make thee?’ This variation on the question
of the previous four stanzas refers to another poem written by Blake, titled “The Lamb”. This poem was published in the
WILD CARD
QUESTIONS,
VISUALS, RUBRICS
volume Songs of Innocence five years before the publication of Songs of Experience.
“The Lamb” is an almost child-like revelation of the beauty and innocence of the natural world, which (just as in this
poem) is thought to reveal the nature of its Creator. In that poem, the speaker asks: ‘Dost thou know who made thee?’ In
light of this, the question posed by the speaker in “The Tyger” takes on a more sinister dimension. The speaker is asking
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P H OTO C O P Y I N G O F T H I S R E S O U R C E I S I N C O N T R AV E N T I O N O F T H E C O P Y R I G H T A C T ( N O. 9 8 1 9 7 8 )
P R E S C R I B E D P O E M S A N D L E A R N I N G M AT E R I A L S F O R G R A D E 1 2
question that has plagued scholars for centuries: how can good and evil exist in the same world?
It is in light of the tension between the tiger’s capacity for violence and the lamb’s innocence, and the moral implications
of this, that the last stanza repeats the lines of the first stanza. While the first stanza was deceptively naive, the last
INTRODUCTION
TO POETRY
how to reconcile the innocent and violent aspects of the natural world, and therefore of this world’s Creator. This in the
speaker asks ‘What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?’ (lines 3–4); in the last, he replaces the
word ‘could’ with ‘dare’ (line 24).
The last stanza might be described as angry or even accusing. The speaker seems to be asking what right the Creator
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stanza is unsettling and threatening. There is a crucial difference in the last line of either stanza: in the first stanza, the
the poem lacks resolution. It cannot give us an answer to the problem it poses; however, other critics argue that this last
stanza holds a vital clue. The lines ‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night’ (lines 1–2) retain their initial
beauty and power, and so the speaker might be suggesting that beauty and violence, good and evil, are intertwined and
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has to create a world in which both violence and innocence, good and evil, exist. Some critics argue that, for this reason,
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AND GOTHIC
cannot be separated. This is the nature of a dichotomy.
QUESTIONS
(3)
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1. Identify the Figure of Speech that is used in line 1 and explain its effectiveness.
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2. Represent the rhyme scheme of the poem (using the form ABCD).
(2)
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3. Who is the speaker addressing in the poem? Justify your answer by quoting from the poem.
(2)
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© THE ENGLISH EXPERIENCE 2011
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QUESTIONS,
VISUALS, RUBRICS
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