Themes Of Innocence In William Blake's The Tyger

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. 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

Creating an extended metaphor between the creator and a blacksmith, Blake poses the questions “What the hammer? What the chain, / In what furnace was thy brain? / What the anvil? What dread grasp,/...” (13-16). The industrial terminology asserts the belief that the tiger is a conscious product of the creator or God. The decision to make a parallel between a blacksmith and God suggests that it was not an effortless process, but rather a laborious and dangerous one, much like the forging of hot metal. It is a process that requires an abundance of energy, which suggests that evil, that is the tiger, was put into the world intentionally. Blake’s later question of, “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” is less so a question, but rather a declaration of the narrator’s realization that, yes, it is the same God that created the lamb and the tiger (20). The two opposite creatures were created to

The idea of intentional flaws may be perplexing at first, but Blake is subconsciously mimicking and following the mold that God has created. Innocence and evil, good and bad exists in many aspects. From the imperfect symmetry of the poem’s form to the incongruent harmony between the poem and the illustration, they all emphasize the idea that good and evil exist simultaneously. It is only with an imperfect world is one able to gather knowledge, make mistakes, and gain experience. It all comes full circle when looking back at the collection, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, that the poem The Tyger is derived from. Without both evil and good, the author would not have had the ability to identify with experience, and the poem The Tyger would not be the