Blog Assignment on William Blake: Due Jan. 20th

First, I'm offering a few thoughts on the poem:

Blake's trochaic tetrameter gives the poem the rhythmic feel of a song, chant--you could read it like a cheerleader, or nursery rhyme. As such, there is a childlike quality to it.

Other aspects that lend to this childlike or puerile quality: obsessive and repetitive questions like a small child is always asking adults, a sense of wonder--the tiger isn't just an animal but a ferocious and mysterious creature, and the feeling that the poem is giving us a kind of moral message in the lines asking if the same God who made the Lamb made the Tyger.

Now some paradoxes or contradictions: If the tyger is holy--all that lives is holy for Blake--how do we rectify it being constructed through the industrial processes he is opposed to? Why would the poem describe an organic living animal as created by industrial processes? Are these descriptions coming from a child's mind so we should read the poem as the utterances of a child? Are they from Blake's mind as a poet? From both? And, is the poem more impressed with the tyger than the lamb when it asks if the same God made both? Does this question imply a binary of good/evil--something Blake would not likely agree with???

With all these paradoxes, what is the effect of the final stanza of the poem--it repeats the first one??


For your writing, 300-400 words, please address one or several of these paradoxes. As part of your writing, I want you to incorporate as evidence for your ideas some interpretation of Blake's illustration for the poem. Why the robotic/idiotic tyger?

I've pasted in the pic above, but you can search for more if you're interested at the William Blake Archive, the original source for the pic above. http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/