The Tyger Poem Analysis

“The Tyger” is a popular and much quoted poem from William Blake’s anthology ‘Songs of Experience’ in which he describes the creation of the tiger and in doing so, emphasizes the dichotomy between good and evil. The poem deals with Blake asking how the creator of such good could create such evil. Blake uses a powerful rhyming scheme, with allusions and rhetorical questions to reflect the evil within The Tyger.

Blake structured The Tyger using six quatrains. He used literary devices such as repetition, rhyming couplets, imagery, and a wide range of rhetorical questions. The first quatrain begins with “Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright.” The use of repetition in this line is to catch the reader’s eye. He uses the word “Tyger” as a metaphor for evil. In his poem, “The Lamb”, he uses the Lamb as a metaphor for innocence, where as The Tyger is a wild and destructive animal. He continues to describe the Tyger as “burning bright” and “in the forests of the night” This suggests that he is commenting on how something obvious can also be elusive and hidden. This invokes an image of The Tyger lurking through the dark night. This also supports the idea that the Tyger is a mysterious creature capable of committing great evil. The quatrain ends with a rhetorical question “What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?” This connects with the central theme of the poem being who created the Tyger? Was it the loving God that created the lamb, or was it the Devil himself?

Blake’s use of language in the second quatrain paints an image of heaven and hell. “In what distant deeps or skies burnt the fire of thine eyes?” Blake is using an allusion to create a biblical reference to Heaven and Hell, hence the distant deeps (hell) or skies (heaven...

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... to catch the reader’s eye and to re-introduce the first few lines of the first quatrain. These lines invoke the same imagery in the first quatrain of a mysterious environment, implying The Tyger is a beast of the night. The “immortal hand or eye” is a biblical reference to the immortality of God. The one difference that Blake makes in his final quatrain is the last line. In his first quatrain he asked “Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” Meaning, is God capable of creating such an evil creature? However, in the last line of the sixth quatrain, it changes to “Dare frame thy fearful symmetry” Blake now asks God whether he would “dare” to create such a fearful creature. God created The Tyger with the intention of it being a terrifying and evil beast, however, he gave The Tyger free will, and there is no excuse for The Tyger to be capable of doing good instead of evil.