The Tiger
Tiger! Tiger! burning
bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine
eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
William Blake
Taken from http://www.online-literature.com/blake/632/
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William Blake
(Great Britain, 1757-1827)
was “creador de una forma de poesía única
acompañada de ilustraciones. Su poesía (…) se encuentra entre las más
originales y proféticas de la lengua inglesa (…). Muchos poetas posteriores,
entre ellos Swinburne, Yeats
y Emily Dickinson,
asimilaron su visión y su estilo literarios.” (http://www.epdlp.com/escritor.php?id=1475 ) Beginning with the analysis of the content of
this poetic text, I would like to quote this little comparison between this
poem and a previous one from the same autor. It’s in the same
web page: “Inocencia y
experiencia, los dos estados opuestos del alma humana, contrastan en dos
piezas como El cordero y El tigre, que representan
respectivamente la inocencia de la niñez y la corrupción y la represión de la
vida adulta.” (http://www.epdlp.com/escritor.php?id=1475 ) The poem is composed of twenty-four verses, with six stanzas containing four lines each one.The composition of the lines is very different from The
lamb: this one was composed of two stanzas with ten lines for each
one. With respect to the rhyme, in The tiger the first stanza
and the last one repeated, so they have the same rhyme, and is AAAB. The
second stanza is the only in the whole poem that has a unique rhyme, the four
lines have the same rhyme (skies, eyes, aspire, fire). The three
remaining stanzas have too the same rhythmic structure, which is AABB. As I have quoted before, this is a poem of
contrast with a previous just written text, The lamb. Both
poems were written at the first stage of Blake’s literary career. The
tiger was in the book Songs of experience, published in 1794
and The lamb, in Songs of innocence, published five
years before, so this fact shows the great talent of this writer, because he
started to write poetry at the age of twelve. If The lamb was a
poem about the (divine) nature of creation, as we can see in some lines of
that poem (He is called by thy name,/ For He
calls Himself a Lamb./ He is meek, and He is mild), The tiger is about
the dark side of that creation, about the evil side of nature, as we can see
in the metaphor of the two first lines of the poem (Tyger!
Tyger! Burning bright/ In the forests of the night):
burning and night have been always negative elements, evil elements, if day
is good, night is bad, if day is goodness, night is evil. In the following
lines Blake refers to the divine nature of the creation and keeps on with
words with represent Evil (What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame thy
fearful symmetry?): with immortal Blake refers, logically, to God,
and fearful is a negative word too. These last two lines are the first
question of the many that Blake writes in the poem (twelve), while in The
lamb he only made five. I think this fact can be explained in this
way: the writer is desesperated with evil in the
world, and he makes so many question to try to find out why is evil in the
world. The first question of the poem is never answered, and is the key of
the poem, the main topic: for the rest of the poem the author tries to
discover the answer to that question. The second question of the poem, In what
distant deeps or skies/ Burnt the fire of thine
eyes?, Blake uses another metaphor to compare fire with the skin colours
of a tiger, which are precisely red and yellow, the colours of fire, another
negative element as I have commented before. In the first stanza of the poem,
Blake wonders if creating an evil can be considered some kind of art, if art
is, in essence, good for society and never bad. The four stanza if full of
questions which contain tools to create things (What the hammer?
what the chain?/ In what furnace was
thy brain?/ What the anvil? what dead grasp?). These tools should
be used to create good things (again, the purpose of art). In the fifth stanza, the two first lines (When
the stars threw down their spears,/ And water’d
heaven with other tears,) are, according to Purwarno
Hadinata, from Fakultas
Sastra UISU, Medan,
Indonesia, “the crux of the poem. “The
stars” can be taken as the rebel angels(…) in Heaven surrendered to the
power of God, which is represented by the tiger.(…) when the fallen angels
were driven into hell, they “watered heaven with their tears”. (…) All
of this has obvious relationship with the fall of man, and the introduction
into the world of death, and such terrors as the tigers. The angels and man
have fallen into Experience. (…) Line 20 of the poem is the climax of the
poem (…) It is amazing that the same creator should have created both the
lamb and the tiger (…)The lamb is innocent and
mild while the tiger is ferocious and merciless. However the same God has
created both of them”. (http://purwarno-sastra-uisu.blogspot.com/2005/12/analysis-fifth-stanza-of-william.html
) The last stanza of the
poem is, as I have already commented at the beginning of the analysis, a repetition
of the first, which means that Blake is more desesperated
than never about the creation of Evil in the earth, and the fact that God,
the eternal goodness, was the creator of this Evil. |
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