English poetry xix-xx
“the tyger” from songs of eXperience by willliam blake
Questions
about god
I
have chosen “The Tyger”, from Songs of
Experience by William Blake, because both Songs of Innocence and of Experience
are probably one of the most important and beautiful work of the romantic poetry
and “The Tyger” is the poem I like
the most. I like it because of the questions that the author makes. Blake is not only an artist but also a
philosopher. He makes so intelligent and deep questions that they could not be
answered in his time and I think they cannot be answered in our time either.
That is what I really like, the questions about God, about the creation, the
nature, the human being, where do we come from, etc... He showed us what an intelligent person he
was. These are the reasons why I have chosen this author and this poem.
I
also have chosen this author because he was probably the “first British
romantic” and he was a real ARTIST,
poet, painter, visionary mystic, and engraver he loved art, in all its
possibilities. He succeed in all of them. William Blake one of the greatest British
artists, he has to be read and well-known by us.
The
poem also has to be with “The Lamb”,
from Songs of Innocence, it is as a antonymous, it means the opposite.
First,
we are going to analyse the metre and rhyme of the poem. The poem is composed
by six quatrains in rhymed couplets, that is aa-bb-cc-dd etc, (With the
exception of the 2nd and the last couple, which is “eye-symmetry”.
Is not a requirement to rhyme always in this way) with the stress on the final
syllable of each verse, which is a masculine rhyme. This is an easy but effective rhyme scheme, because it
gives a great rhythm to the poem and a clear and strong structure. This
structure is also used in “The Lamb”; as I said, there many similarities in
some poems from Songs of Innocence with others from Songs of Experience, but we
will see this later.
This
solid rhythm achieved by using the couplets is completed with the continuous
use of questions that help to make clear the central idea, who could dare to
create such a creature? Who is the Blacksmith?
Who is the Creator? Who has forged such a terrible heart?
“The meter is regular and rhythmic; its hammering beat suggestive of the smithy that is the poem's central image”. “Comparing the creator to a blacksmith, the speaker ponders about
the anvil and the furnace that the project would have required and the smith
who could have wielded them”.(from Spark notes, http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/blake/section6.rhtml).
Through
this rhyme scheme, we can go further and analyse the main ideas (I think there
are two main images) of the poem and its meaning.
The
couplets and the use of questions again and again symbolize perfectly a hammer
beating, as if we were seeing a Blacksmith (the Creator) working. I believe
Blake creates a great sensation in the reader “hammering” us with couplets and
questions, it is a great resource, a great tool. If you read the poem aloud, you realise about the
rhythm of the poem, and you really can imagine a Blacksmith hitting the anvil:
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
The
blacksmith is one of the most important symbols in Blake’s poetry, and, of
course, in this poem. Blake saw God as an artist, as a creator, and a
Blacksmith is a good comparison, a good metaphor to represent how “God-Artist”
gives shape to his ideas.
“One of the central themes in his major
works is that of the Creator as a blacksmith. This is both God the Creator
(personified in Blake's myth as Los) and Blake himself (again with Los as his
alter-ego.) Blake identified God's creative process with the work of an artist.
And it is art that brings creation to its fulfilment -- by showing the world as
it is, by sharpening perception, by giving form to ideas”. (from Friedlander ER (1999) Enjoying
"The Tyger" by William Blake Retrieved Dec. 25, 2003 from http://www.pathguy.com/tyger.htm).
The
other main image in this poem is, obviously, the Tyger. The Tyger means the
opposite to “The Lamb”, I think it
means the evil, the bad things that we find in the world, in our lives. As the
Lamb means the good things( he represents Jesus), as for example, the Innocence of a child, the Tyger means
the bad ones, which are known by acquiring Experience,
it is completely the opposite to what the Lamb means.
In
the 2nd couplet we can read:
What immortal
hand or eye,
Could frame
thy fearful symmetry?
The fearful symmetry is evidently LAMB-TYGER/INNOCENCE-EXPERIENCE
“Although
the natural world contains much that is gentle and innocent ("Songs of
Innocence"), those who are
experienced with life ("Songs of Experience") know that there is
also much that is terrible and frightening. (The "fearful symmetry"
might be that of the lamb and the tiger, innocence and experience.*)”.
At
first, you are innocent, you do not know anything about life, we are no wicked,
evil, we are as a Lamb, but as we begin
to know the world, as we get experienced, we find that evil exists, that we can
choose to be good or evil and act in this or that way.
The
doubt the author brings up here is obvious; if the LAMB (JESUS) means all the good things we have, and the Tyger means the
whole evilness in the world, how can both come from the same creator? How can
Jesus and the evilness have the same father?
Why
there are good and evil things in the same world, how can the same being, the
same creator, the same Blacksmith, the same mind, give
shape to a Lamb (Innocence, goodness) and at the same time create such a
terrible creature as the Tyger is?
“The
contrast with "The Lamb" is obvious. ("Little Lamb, who made
thee? Dost thou know who made thee?" The answer is God, who became
incarnate as Jesus the Lamb.) "The Tyger" asks, "Did he who made
the Lamb make thee?" And the answer is, "Yes, God made the Tyger
too."
*(
from Friedlander ER (1999) Enjoying "The Tyger" by William Blake
Retrieved Dec. 25, 2003 from http://www.pathguy.com/tyger.htm).
This
couplet is spectacular:
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?
Blake
asks the tiger if God smiled when he watched his creation. That is, how could
he create such an evil thing, was he pleased when finished? How could the same
person create the Lamb too. Is it possible? How can exist this duplicity, this
ambiguity?
Jonathan
Jones (The Guardian) says: “Blake was
perplexed by the things that should perplex people - moral absolutes, the
limits of perception, the tragic
duplicities by which we live. All this is expressed in his Songs of
Innocence and Experience; who cannot recognise the corruption of inequality in
his lines, "Pity would be no more,
/ If we did not make somebody Poor"?” (from arts.guardian, Blake’s heaven, Jonathan Jones, Monday 25,
April 2005) http://arts.guardian.co.uk/critic/feature/0,1169,1469584,00.html
I
think this couplet summarizes the sense of the poem. This is a deep thought, no
one in his time had thought like him, he was a genius.
At
this point, I only find an answer. For Blake this world is only a step in our
existence, there are good and evil ways and you have to choose the
right one to “achieve the salvation”, the heaven.
Obviously,
this is a Christian way to understand the world, we have to think that Blake
was a Christian and he lived almost 300 years ago, when religion was even most
powerful than today is. The majority of pieces of art had to be with religious
topics.
But
nowadays, the ideas expressed by Blake in this poem are completely valid, not
only for Christian but for everybody, and that fact proves that Blake was a
genius, he thought something almost 300 years ago and today it is a valid idea.
He really knew his society and he really worried about its problems, as other
romantics did.
I would like to emphasize the love for nature
of the romantics that we also see in this poem. Blake uses animals (the Lamb,
Tyger...) as metaphors, images to express his ideals, he always had nature present in his work. We also see
how for William Blake, as for the great romantics, imaginative and emotional expression overcome
rational analysis. He looked for an answer not in a rational but in
a dreamily, imaginative way, as anyone had done before. That makes him special.
Blake
was a genius, but he was not appreciated during his time, his mind was over the
rest and that made him a misunderstood artist and person:
“William Blake is far and away the greatest
artist Britain has ever produced. I feel both elated and embarrassed to say
that, because in recent years the critical reputation of the poet, printmaker
and radical prophet of the French revolutionary era has been slipping, to say
the least. Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell are never likely to be shifted from their place near the heart of
English literature. But Blake thought of himself as a visual artist; he
illuminated his self-published writings, illustrated Dante and Chaucer, and
painted singular oils such as The Ghost of a Flea”. (from arts.guardian, Blake’s heaven, Jonathan Jones, Monday 25,
April 2005) http://arts.guardian.co.uk/critic/feature/0,1169,1469584,00.html
He “ condemned the cruel absurdity of enforced
chastity and marriage without love and defended the right of women to complete
self-fulfilment”. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_blake). This is only an example. His way of
thinking was over the rest, he was a privileged person, his mind had questions
that common people did not think during his time, even in our days.
He
also looked for new ways of art, as for example the relief etching, “a method he would use to produce most of his
books, paintings, pamphlets and of course his poems, including his longer
'prophecies' and his masterpiece the "Bible". The process is also
referred to as illuminated printing, and final products as illuminated books or prints. Illuminated printing involved writing the
text of the poems on copper plates with pens and brushes, using an
acid-resistant medium. Illustrations could appear alongside words in the manner
of earlier illuminated manuscripts. He then etched the plates in acid in order to dissolve
away the untreated copper and leave the design standing in relief (hence the
name). This is a reversal of the normal method of etching, where the lines of the design are exposed to the acid,
and the plate printed by the intaglio method. Relief
etching, which Blake invented, later became an
important commercial printing method. The pages printed from these plates then
had to be hand-coloured in water colours and stitched together to make up a
volume. Blake used illuminated printing for most of his well-known works,
including Songs
of Innocence and Experience, The
Book of Thel, The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Jerusalem” (from
Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_blake).
Although
Blake was a great artist, probably the greatest romantic, he was not
appreciated as he deserved, not only as a writer but as a painter, also
nowadays.
Again Jones has an answer, “You
can't experience Blake's art in isolation from his language, and that is the
real reason for his current devaluation. Britain has always been a literary
culture but very recently we've fallen in love with visual art. Now we look to
our past for great art - finding modern expression in a Constable mud patch.
We're kidding ourselves. British
art has been minor compared to Shakespeare and Dickens. The world needs these
writers but not our artists. Blake is
the exception because he unifies the verbal and the visual and, uniquely,
ensures that some of the central poetry in the language exists in pictures as
well as words”. (from
arts.guardian, Blake’s heaven, Jonathan
Jones, Monday 25, April 2005) http://arts.guardian.co.uk/critic/feature/0,1169,1469584,00.html
So, Blake is the answer if you look for a complete ARTIST, he was a
genius, if you look for poetry, you have the best poetry, if you look for
paintings, you will have paintings, and if you look for both combined (he
was probably the first who used this
resource), you will have wonderful works. He was, and is the greatest reference
for artists and for art lovers of Britain.
Notes:
http://www.gailgastfield.com/innocence/soi.htm 22/11/2007 18:36
http://www.poetseers.org/the_poetseers/blake 22/11/2007 18:24
http://www.pathguy.com/tyger.htm 22/11/2007 18:40
Friedlander
ER (1999) Enjoying "The Tyger" by William Blake Retrieved Dec.
25, 2003 from http://www.pathguy.com/tyger.htm
http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/blake/section6.rhtml 21/11/2007 19:30
http://gale.cengage.com/free_resources/poets/poems/tyger.htm 19/11/2007 17:01
http://www.blakearchive.org 19/11/2007 17:32
http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/erdgensearch.xq?query=innocence&bool=and&x=0&y=0
10/01/2008 17:09
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_blake
10/01/08 17:54 – 14/01/08 18:46
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/critic/feature/0,1169,1469584,00.html
10/01/08 18:01