1.
INTRODUCTION
In this paper on the romantic poetry, I’m going to talk about William
Blake who was the earliest writer of the English Romanticism. He was a poet
and a painter who illustrated and printed his own books. He transformed his images
into a representation of his inner world.
The poems that I have chosen in order to analyse them are The Lamb
included in the Songs of Innocence
Book and The Tyger in the Songs of
Experience Book.
Blake was very much a child of his time: deeply
concerned with contemporary political events, highly aware of social
developments, immersed in the
(cf. Bottrall, 12)
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 spear
And water'd 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! (1794)
(cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyger)
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life & bid thee feed,
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, wooly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb.
He is meek & he is mild;
He became a little child.
I a child & thou a lamb.
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb, God bless thee!
Little Lamb, God bless thee!(1789)
(cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lamb)
As I have said
before I’m going to analyze “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” poems of William Blake
but I’m going to focus my attention on “The Tyger” relating it with “The Lamb”.
“The Tyger”
is one of Blake's best known and most analyzed poems and it was written around
1794 as a part of his collection Songs of
Experience. In both form and subject the poem closely follows his earlier
work "The Lamb"
that was part of his Songs of Innocence collection.
(cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyger)
(cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lamb)
3. ANALYSIS OF THE POEM
3.1 THE TITLE
The titles
that William Blake uses for both poems are animals and in my opinion, these two
titles were put in order to say us something more than the poems are about a
lamb and a tiger.
The lamb is
a docile and calm animal and if we want we could do whatever we want with it
and in contrast, we could say that a tiger is a fierce animal and it is
difficult to train it.
With these
animals, I think that William Blake is trying to compare two different moments
in his life and in others: a moment in which all the people could live in calm
and without fears, and a time in which there were a lot of ups and downs
because of some changes in society.
3.2 THEMES
From my
point of view, the main theme in the poem of The Tyger is the fear, the
fear that all the people at the time had because of the changes that were
provoked by the industrialization. There are some words like “fire” and “forest
of the night” that contribute expressing this fear because for example the
forest being plenty of darkness and full of fierce animals is a place which is
very dangerous.
Another
theme that is present is the loss of faith in God at the time, because of all
the changes and finally, the different point of view that the people have as
they grow up.
3.3 STRUCTURE
William
Blake didn’t divide his poem into stanzas but according on what the poem says,
I divide it into four parts.
The first
division that I will make would be from the 1st line to the 10th
because here the author is describing what kind of fierce the tiger is, trying
to express us the horror that this beast transmits.
The second
would be from the 11th to the 16th line where he is
saying and wondering what kind of things that belong to industrialization can
provoke such incredible changes and how these things can make the people change
their point of view.
And finally,
from the 17th line to the 20th, the author is wondering a
lot of things that have changed and why have changed, what could provoke them.
At the end
of the poem, he repeats nearly the same verses that he writes in the beginning
of the poem. He does it in order to emphasize that something bad has occurred.
Tyger,
tyger, burning bright
In the
forests of the night
What
immortal hand or eye
Could frame
thy fearful symmetry.
(…)
Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the
forests of the night
What
immortal hand or eye
Dare frame
thy fearful symmetry
There are
only two words that the author changed.
3.4 STYLE
3.4.1 COMMUNICATIVE STRUCTURE
The text is
written in the archaic form of 2nd person when the author refers to
the tiger directly. Examples of these forms are “thy” (lines 4, 10, 11, 14 and
24) “thine” (line 6) and “thee” (line 20). He also uses the 3rd
person sometimes when he talks about the tiger which produces a sort of fear in
the people. Here, he doesn’t treat the tiger as an animal and he doesn’t refer
it with the “it”, he talks about it referring to it using the “he”. We can see
examples of this mark in the poem “Did he who made the Lamb make thee” (line
20) and “he smiles his work to see” (line 19). Apart from this, he refers to it
using the Vocative “Tyger, Tyger” (line 1 and 21).
By analyzing
the verbal forms, I notice that there are verbs in present like “smile” (line
19), “aspire” (line 7), verbs in past as for instance “began” (line 11), “threw
down” (line 17) and modal verbs “could” (line 4 and 10).
In my
opinion, the author uses the modal verb “could” in order to wonder himself if
something could happen.
3.4.2 COHESION
We can
observe in the poem the absence of coordination connectors. We can find twice
the connector “and” at the beginning of two verses in line 11 and 18. we see
commas in places where we would put a coordination connector. For instance, in
line 15 “what the anvil, what dread grasp”. In contrast, there are some
adversative connectors in lines 3, 5 and 23.
On the other
hand, I would like to pay attention a bit on rhetorical devices. I cannot find
a lot of examples but I’m going to tell you some of them. We can see that there
are some metaphors. For instance, we could say that “burning bright” (line1),
“Burnt the fire of thine eyes!” (Line 6), “when the stars threw down their
spear” (line 17), “and water’d heaven with their tears”. The two first ones are
used to describe the defiant look of the tyger, saying that is like the fire,
and the last ones to refer to the desesperation of humanity.
As well as
this, I could find repetition of words like “thy” (lines 4, 10 and 24), “frame”
(lines 4 and 24), “dare” (lines 4, 16 and 24) and repetition of whole verses
like the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th, and
21st, 22nd, 23rd and 24th.
The vocative,
that I have mention before, which the author uses with the finality of call the
attention of the reader remarking that he is going to talk about an animal, but
particularly, to the tyger. We can see it in lines 1 and 21.
And finally,
I can say that I find two personifications in the poem in lines 19 and 20 when
he refers to the tyger talking about it with “he” and when the author writes
“when the stars threw down their spear” in line 17.
3.4.3
LEXIS AND SEMANTICS
There are a
lot of lexical fields in the poem. We can find the lexical field of FIRE
“burning” (line 1), “bright” (line 1), “burnt” (line 6) and “fire” (line 6); of
UNIVERSE “deeps” (line 5), “skies” (line 5), “stars” (line 17) and “heaven”
(line 18); of INDUSTRY “hammer”(line13) and “anvil” (line15); of PARTS OF THE
BODY “hand” and “eye” (line 3), “shoulder” (line 9), “heart” (line 10) and
“feet” (line 12); and of FEAR “fearful” (line 4), “terrors” (line 16) and
“dread” (line 15).
3.4.4
RHYTHM AND RHYME
This poem is
rhymed as we can observe. The metrical rhythm is AABBCCDDEEFF… and so on. We
can say that it is perfectly rhymed. “Bright” and “night”, “skies” and “eyes”,
“aspire” and “fire”, “chain” and “brain”, rhyme.
The Lamb is grounded in the
pastoral settings of Blake's youth and The Tyger is set in the
industrialized modernity. (cf. Punter, 134). We see some images of the
industrial world like fire, hammers, anvils and furnaces.
The poem of
“The Lamb” is about religion, specifically about Christianity because the lamb
is a symbol of innocence and religion and it represents Jesus as a gentle man.
Whereas, the poem that I have chosen in order to analyze it, The Tyger, reflects
the thoughts that the people had at that time, they thought that evil exists in
the world.this
text is plenty of questions
which people wondered all the time because, due to they were accustomed to
something, they didn’t understand what happened.
The poem begins with the speaker
asking a tiger what kind of divine being could have created it in the 3rd
and 4th lines. For me, the Tyger is God and all the time, the author
of the poem is addressing to him.The speaker wonders how the creator, a noble and gentle
God, would have created this kind of horrible animal. He refers to a God who
creates a world of misery.
As I have
said before in the analysis of the poem, in the 2nd line and 22nd
line where he says “in the forests of the night”, he could be naming the danger
that supposed all those changes of industrialization because we think,
immediately, that these forests mean danger, darkness and solitude.
In the 7th
and 8th lines, we can observe that the devil could exist and play a
role in creating the universe. It seems to be that people think these kinds of
things.
The reference to the lamb in
the 20th line reminds the reader that a tiger and a lamb have been
created by the same God, that is, the same God have created both good and bad
things and not only good things as people thought before that moment.
On the other
hand, as the poem progresses, the author tries to represent a moral problem: The tiger is very beautiful, but it is
very dangerous too, an animal capable of great destruction so, we have to be
careful because those things that seem to be the best thing we can have, they
could be the major error of our life.
I would like
to mention here that the “stars” in line 17 and the “heaven” in line 18
symbolize the restrictions imposed upon the man by laws of the world and the “stars”
also mean the breaking down of the barriers which separate man from his own
humanity. (cf. Keynes, 198-217).
Another
interpretation of the poem could be that the lamb and the tiger are symbols for two different
states of the human soul. The tiger is Blake’s symbol for the fierce forces in
the soul which are needed to break the bonds of experience.
(cf. Bottrall, 158)
5. CONCLUSION
In order to sum up, I have to say that the life of imagination was more
real to him than the material world and that he was essentially a religious
poet, more concerned with eternity than with the productions of time as we can
observe in the poems that I have analyzed.
“The Lamb”
is represented as a look at childish innocence and “The Tyger” as the innocent
child growing up. While “The Lamb” is one of his most transparent poems, "The Tyger" seems like a simple poem but it
contains all the complexities of the human mystery.
Finally, I
have to add that I have chosen this author, William Blake, in order to do my
paper because it is said that with him the Romanticism started and because of
that we can consider him a romantic poet and the most important one, although
he didn’t write during this period.
7. BIBLIOGRAPHY
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyger
Home:
<www.wikipedia.org> 15/02/07)
-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lamb
Home:
<www.wikipedia.org>
15/02/07)
-
Margaret Bottrall, William Blake, Songs of Innocence and
Experience.
-
David Punter, William Blake: selected poetry and prose.
-
Geoffrey Keynes, Songs of innocence and of experience.
The author and printer W. Blake.