The Tyger (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

“The Tyger” has long been recognized as one of Blake’s finest poems; in his 1863 Life of William Blake, biographer Alexander Gilchrist relates that the poem “happens to have been quoted often enough ... to have made its strange old Hebrewlike grandeur, its Oriental latitude yet force of eloquence, comparatively familiar” and that essayist and critic Charles Lamb wrote of Blake: “I have heard of his poems, but have never seen them. There is one to a tiger ... which is glorious!” In his 1906 work William Blake: A Critical Essay, British poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne similarly calls the lyric “a poem beyond praise for its fervent beauty and vigour of music.”

Many critics have focused on the symbolism in “The Tyger,” frequently contrasting it with the language, images, and questions of origin presented by its “innocent” counterpart, “The Lamb.” E. D. Hirsch, Jr., for instance, notes that while “The Tyger” satirizes the lyrics found in “The Lamb” that is not the poem’s primary function. As the critic asserts in his Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake, in combining tones of terror and awe at a being that could create the tiger as well as the lamb, the poet “celebrates the divinity and beauty of the creation and its transcendance of human good and evil without relinquishing the Keatsian awareness that ’ the miseries of the world Are misery.’” Hazard Adams believes that the poem demonstrates that “creation in art is for Blake the renewal of visionary truth.” He explains in his 1963 study William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems that while the tiger may be terrifying, it presents an intensity of vision that should be welcomed with “a gaiety which can find a place in the divine plan for both the tears and spears of the stars, ... and for both the tiger and the lamb.”

While “The Tyger” can be read in a variety of ways, Mark Schorer asserts in William Blake: The Politics of Vision that “the juxtaposition of lamb and tiger points not merely to the opposition of innocence and experience, but to the resolution of the paradox they present.” As the lamb is subjected to the travails of the world, “innocence is converted to exprience. It does not rest there. Energy can be curbed but it cannot be destroyed, and when it reaches the limits of its endurance, it bursts forth in revolutionary wrath.” Jerome J. McGann, however, asserts in a 1973 essay that the poem defies specific interpretation: “As with so many of Blake’s lyrics, part of the poem’s strategy is to resist attempts to imprint meaning upon it. ’ The Tyger’ tempts us to a cognitive apprehension but in the end exhausts our efforts.” As a result, the critic concludes, “the extreme diversity of opinion among critics of Blake about the meaning of particular poems and passages of poems is perhaps the most eloquent testimony we have to the success of his work.”