Blake's Tyger

7

A Retrospect:

The Resolution of

We have completed our study of The Tyger. We may conclude with a brief retrospect. The starting-point in our treatment of the poem was an analysis of its "Minute Particulars, Organized", and the analysis resolved the poem's symbolism into a mytho-poeic vision of Christ's battle in Heaven with revolted angels.

The details of this vision - the ultimate empyrean of the supreme lustre-hidden Godhead, the winged intermediate Creator who is essentially one with that Godhead yet existen-tially secondary and who aspiring from his existential status to the primary blaze and brightness that are his own right by essence draws from them the heat and light of the destructive power needed to fight warrior stars in the forests of the night, the smithwise forging of this power in the shape of a terrible supernatural Tyger which is at once contrary and complementary to a supernatural Lamb-shape - all these details are supported with elements of Christian religious tradition. After picking out some lines from T. S. Eliot and Christopher Smart, the former of whom has actually the phrase "Christ the tiger", we looked mainly at the Old and the New Testaments, cast a glance at some early theologians and referred in passing to a few phrases from poetic literature.

We next took up the most explicit as well as the most massive literary treatment in English of the subject we had discerned in The Tyger. We traced the poem's inspiration to a pregnant phrase - "devouring fire" - used in Milton's Paradise Lost for God's anger going out against Lucifer-Satan. And we set forth a close correspondence between Blake's composition and Mil-

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ton's account of Christ's wrathfully burning war with and defeat of Satan's army in Heaven. It seemed to us that Blake was influenced by Milton at almost every step and even Miltonic words and images were absorbed into The Tyger for a new and individual creation. In this creation the chief person of the drama assimilated certain aspects of both the Satan and the Christ of Milton's epic. Milton gave to his Satan a boundless energy of Desire. Blake held that this energy, rather than the Rationality which Milton considered proper, pertained to the Messiah. He also found apt to his purpose the warrior energy which Milton attributed to his Messiah in Book VI. So, Miltonic ideas and expressions in relation to both Christ and Satan got fused in the poetic reconstruction of the Miltonic theme by Blake.

Then we scrutinized the growth of The Tyger from the early drafts and examined the illustration Blake made of the final version. We found nothing in them against our reading: on the contrary, they bore it out in some respects.

Finally, we proceeded to fit our Christological view of the poem into Blake's general mythology of Supernature. In this mythology too Christ is the central figure, but four basic aspects of him are also given prominence and called the Four Zoas. They are named Los (or Urthona), Urizen, Luvah (or Orc) and Tharmas. Among these, Los who is the Spirit of Prophecy and the Poetic Genius as well as the Divine Smith is closest to Christ and occasionally gets identified with him.

In the context of Blake's general mythology we discovered in the Tyger's maker a fusion of Christ and Los, and in the revolted angel-stars we recognized under various aspects the followers of Urizen who is said by Blake to have broken away from the Fourfold Christ-oneness of Eternity into a separate existence of mere rationality. Urizen is associated with spear-bearing warrior stars within a supra-terrestrial darkness, a forest of the night, symbolic of his defection in Heaven. The same symbol stands in Blake on a large scale for the world of Nature, where the Tyger also represents frequently the discordant force of a life in which beings prey on one another instead

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of forming a harmony. But we demonstrate that Blake does not confine himself to the Fall from Heaven, which is equivalent to Urizen's creation of the physical universe such as the mechanical philosophy of Newtonian science in the eighteenth century conceived, making it independent of Mind. The fall from Heaven was preceded by a Fall in Heaven itself. With regard to this first Fall the Tyger is an anti-Urizen power in Supernature just as on certain occasions it can be shown to be such in even Blake's mythology of Nature.

Elaborating the symbolic opposition of the Tyger and the Night-forests in Supernature, we confronted Kathleen Raine's interpretation of our lyric from Neo-platonic, Gnostic, Hermetic, Cabbalistic and Alchemical sources. Her interpretation is, in our eyes, the most convincing possible if we overlook the traditional Christian-Miltonic background of Blake's treatment of these sources, a background not always easily discernible but, on very close analysis, unmistakable.

At the end of our section on Blake's other writings we referred to the lyric prefixed by Blake to his own "Prophecy" Milton. We found the fundamentals of it indirectly elucidating the sense of The Tyger with a direct harking back, though in a new setting, to the account of Christ contra Satan in Paradise Lost.

Thus our total reading of The Tyger is a complex one. We believe that the complexity is fully demanded by our research. But criticism of some matters in parts of our thesis would not affect our chief contribution to the subject of the poem's symbolism: this contribution lies in the supernatural Christological interpretation of The Tyger and a general seeing of its basis in Milton. "A general seeing" - for, all the minutiae of our Miltonic view are not vital to its validity: they render it more varied and rich, but what is really vital is the overall Miltonism of Blake's Christological vision. We are not required essentially to go beyond the Miltonism comprized in the luminously fierce attack of Christ the Son with the might gathered from God the Father, and the excessive distress of his enemies who yet are on purpose not destroyed.

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The poem in our reading, expresses an intense conflict in the poet's religious being. The conflict has a particular aspect and a general one. The latter includes the problem of God's punishment of the human soul for its sin, but though important in the total picture it is rather an extension of the main problem which constitutes the former. The conflict has its source in the poet's seeing of Wrath gone incandescently forth in Heaven against rebellious forces that are a supernatural darkness there. Simultaneously terrible and splendid in the extreme is this Wrath which cannot but be Christ's, yet which strikes strangely on the poet's sensibilities. Despite his awareness of the Divinity within and behind this manifestation, he is spurred to a set of questions wondering who could be responsible for it. He cannot quite bring himself to accept what he knows. How could Christ combine so much ferocity and so much beauty? - that is the puzzle. Then the poet further concentrates on the ferocity by comparing the ireful Godhead to the gentle Godhead of our usual conception, the loving kindness that dwells in Heaven and may be considered the original face of the Supreme. Here the poem reaches its climax of critical vision. The poet is profoundly shaken, almost bewildered, because, as Milton tells us, the revolted angels, after being mercilessly vanquished, were spared annihilation only to be everlastingly banished from Heaven by one who, though remaining gloriously divine, seems to out-Satan Satan in dreadful power - the deity who is no longer Christ the Lamb but Christ the Tyger.

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