The Tyger Poem Analysis

Four of the poems The Lamb, The Piano, Baby Tortoise and War Photographer express quite profound positive affection although in different ways (The Tyger more than anything else expresses an overwhelming feeling of awe.) With War Photographer and Education for Leisure the emotions probably reflect the greater complexities of the time. The persona in War Photographer is faced with the moral dilemma of taking pictures of dying war victims. Through the poem’s description, the reader is challenged to consider the emotional and moral tensions felt by the photographer, as well as to question the attitudes of the public to suffering as seen in the mass media. With War Photographer the relative simplicity of the emotions in Blake’s and D.H. Lawrence’s poems have been left long way behind. With Education for Leisure, which is in fact about hatred, megalomania and even the effect of celebrity culture we are now even further away from Blake and Lawrence’s poems than the war photographer is. However what unites all these poems are feelings of great intensity.

The Tyger is a part of a collection called ‘Songs of Experience’. In “The Tyger” Blake writes of an idea about the creation of evil. “The Tyger” is the opposite of “The Lamb”, because instead of writing about the creation of good, he writes about the creation of evil. The poem itself presents a sort of more complex view on one central question that he repeats twice in the poem referring to the evil of the Tyger. “Who could/dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” The poem is full such of rhetorical questions. One way in which Blake shows emotions is through the use of rhymes and trochees which are then emphasized by alliteration such as "burning bright," "distant deeps," what wings" and "Tyge...

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...amb written in 1794, The Piano and The Baby Tortoise c.1920’s and War Photographer and Education for Leisure in the 1980s), they are in some respect united by common emotions. However, we can see in the six poems a marked change in society and its preoccupations. In “The Tyger” and “The Lamb”, Blake’s main concerns are religious whilst in “The Piano” and “The Baby Tortoise” we see a move away from religious concerns to more personal concerns with Baby Tortoise especially the movement away from religion is quite extreme and obviously deeply affected by the work of Charles Darwin. By the time we come to War Photographer and Education for Leisure there is a gulf between these two poems and Blake’s. The main concern in Carol Ann Duffy’s are social and the evil of The Tyger is not generalised but embodied in War and in the first person narrator in Education for Leisure.