Tyger! Tyger! 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 sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & 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?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Tigre, tigre, que te enciendes en luz
por los bosques de la noche
¿qué mano inmortal, qué ojo
pudo idear tu terrible simetría?

¿En qué profundidades distantes,
en qué cielos ardió el fuego de tus ojos?
¿Con qué alas osó elevarse?
¿Qué mano osó tomar ese fuego?

¿Y qué hombro, y qué arte
pudo tejer la nervadura de tu corazón?
Y al comenzar los latidos de tu corazón,
¿qué mano terrible? ¿Qué terribles pies?

¿Qué martillo? ¿Qué cadena?
¿En qué horno se templó tu cerebro?
¿En qué yunque?
¿Qué tremendas garras osaron
sus mortales terrores dominar?

Cuando las estrellas arrojaron sus lanzas
y bañaron los cielos con sus lágrimas
¿sonrió al ver su obra?
¿Quien hizo al cordero fue quien te hizo?

Tigre, tigre, que te enciendes en luz,
por los bosques de la noche
¿qué mano inmortal, qué ojo
osó idear tu terrible simetría?

Numerous experts have attempted to explain William Blake's The Tyger and the powerful effect of those 24 lines on the reader's emotions and imagination. It seems presumptuous to add anything new to the volume. However, no two people's reactions to a poem with such evocative power will be identical. The words obviously do not change, but a person's response to them will alter with his or her age and accrual of experience.

Before beginning, a few unarguable details about where the poem fits into Blake's total works bear recounting. Songs of Innocence appeared in 1789. Five years later Blake published a second volume which included the one just mentioned - a volume titled Songs of Innocence and Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. Contrary to popular belief, Blake never published Songs of Experience as a separate volume, indicating that he intended the poems to be viewed as diptychs, although not every Song of Innocence has a counterpart in the later publication. It is clear, since the Lamb is mentioned in the Tyger, that these two poems are intended to be paired and compared. No more stark contrast can be imagined than that of the fearsome Tyger and the gentle Lamb.

(N.B. when referring to Blake's imaginary feline, I will use the archaic spelling tyger. When remarking in general about such an animal, I will use the modern spelling. Many modern collections update Blake's spelling. However, I have always felt that the older spelling in stanza one is a reminder that the "y" in the concluding word "symmetry" is pronounced as a long "i" in order to rhyme perfectly with the preceding line's "eye.")

In the poem under consideration, an adult speaker possibly the poet apostrophizes a beast seen in his lively imagination. There are no tigers or tygers in England. He doesn't try to strike up a conversation with a creature that he knows cannot respond. His address consists of a series of rhetorical questions about the Divinity or other immortal being who could create the Tyger and if that power is also the creator of the Lamb. He expects no answers and receives none.

The poem strikes chords on a preconscious level and affects readers with a reaction more visceral than intellectual. The exclamation points in line 1 indicate the awe and wonder associated with a beast of prey, the contemplation of which engenders equal parts of terror and beauty. No one can take literally the descriptive "burning bright." Animals do not burn even though one of the two colors associated with tigers is also the color of flame. "Jungles" might be more appropriate than "forests" to describe the Bengal tiger's habitat, but such a quibble would be erring on the side of logic and geography as would saying that the sun shines where tigers prowl just as it does in our ordinary lives. The forests of the night are symbolic of the mysterious and unknowable.

In line 6 that complex of associations stirred by the opening line shifts from the orange and black striping of the animal's body and fixes on the eyes of the creature. The speaker's second question asks, "In what distant deeps or skies/Burnt the fire of thine eyes." We don't ask what "deeps" are referred to. We accept the alliterative "distant deeps" as we did the earlier "burning bright" more for their contribution to tone than for precise denotation.

Our focus and that of the speaker is on the fearsome nature and magnificence of the indomitable creature who has no predator but simultaneously on its creator. "What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" The body parts mentioned are anthropomorphisms and synecdoches allowing us to imagine an immortal (thus superhuman) artisan. The verb "frame" suggests the ability of the otherworldly being not just to shape such fearful symmetry but also to encompass and delimit it.

Images of heat and flame expand as the blacksmith language of "hammer," "chain" "furnace" and "anvil" appears in stanzas 3 and 4 and the poem's pounding trochaic rhythm seem like that hammer ringing on that anvil. But is the smith God or Satan? Did the artistic conception originate in the distant deeps of Hell or the skies of Heaven? Whose inconceivably powerful shoulder could "twist the sinews of thy heart?"And whoever the dread artist was, did he "smile" in satisfaction with what he had wrought?

The penultimate stanza may begin with an allusion to Milton's Paradise Lost and the conflict of rebel angels and good angels. Other critics reject that notion and frame "When the stars threw down their spears,/ And watered heaven with their tears" as various conceptions of dew fall, love, pity, the blacksmith's use of water to cool and temper the heated object upon which he has been hammering and sending out showers of spear-like sparks. Was that smile God's approval of the conclusion of the war in heaven? There is no consensus of opinion. As with all the other questions in the poem, no answer is given.

Is it logical that the creator of the lamb could be also the artificer of the tiger? Could the same being create the music of the spheres, the glories of rainbow and sunrise as well as the destruction of earthquakes, plague and pestilence? Again, the question is unanswerable. The universe is what it is, (note that the interrogative "what" appears 13 times in the poem) and the same can be said of our world, its denizens, and the coexistence of good and evil.

One of Blake's often quoted lines - "Without contraries there can be no progression" - seems to underlie Blake's dualism. The idea of oppositions is clear in his titles such as Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Being neither a religious philosopher nor an advanced student of Blake's mysticism and his challenges to deism and orthodox Christianity, I am forced to use simple layman's terms. Without sorrow we would be incapable of knowing joy, without pain we would not appreciate ease and comfort.

Blake's last stanza repeats stanza 1 except for a key change in the verb phrases of the concluding lines. Stanza 1's simple "could frame thy fearful symmetry" becomes "dare frame they fearful symmetry." We read right over the non-connotative "could" in the poem's beginning but "dare from" with its hovering accent is emotionally arresting. The final question asks if an immortal creator would dare to create on earth and in the soul of mankind a tyger symbolizing the fear and hate without which there would not exist the contraries of trust and love.

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