Blake's Tyger

Last Words

This book, written originally in 1961, has had to wait for more than a quarter century to get published. Although appreciated, it was returned by one publishing company in India because it was judged unlikely to have an appeal wide enough for large sales. My friend Arabinda Basu made an attempt to interest publishers in the U.S.A. An enterprising company received a favourable verdict from one official reader, but a discouraging opinion from another. As the latter may have been more forcefully expressed, no resort was made to a third and final arbitrating assessment. Now at last funds have come for me to bring the book out on my own. My nephew Dr. Ferdauz N. Canteenwalla, practising in the States, has made the liberal gift.

The book has not undergone any change since the Postscript was written, except in two respects. First, I have set right a small number of scholarly peccadilloes to which my attention was silently drawn by whoever had read the typescript for the American publisher with special care: he had put marginal signs in pencil against a few syntactical oversights, misspellings, inaccurate references or slips in quotations. The rejection of my book has not been devoid of some advantage to me. Secondly, I have added as an Appendix a fine letter of critical appraisal from Miss Raine, dated February 4, 1979, after she had gone through the typescript in its final form, and a comment on her outlook by myself rounding off the discussion that had started nearly twenty years earlier.

All through the book and even in the rounding-off comment it is suggested that either Miss Raine has hit the mark or I have done it: the two visions cannot be fused except in a very minor sense. But now I may conjure up a possibility beyond their mutual exclusion as regards fundamentals. I leave it to experts to contemplate the strange question: "Could The Tyger by any

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chance yield a double perspective, the central theme allowing two distinct antithetical views, alternatively Christological-Miltonic and Alchemical-Hermetic?"

February 21, 1987

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