2
The first thing to strike us is that it is not any one part of the Tyger which is said to burn. As Harding1 puts it apropos of the opening phrase -
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright -
"we may (in view of the second stanza) think primarily of the two burning eyes in the darkness, but the phrase itself makes the whole tiger a symbol of a 'burning' quality..." The Tyger's entire body which in physical fact would not be visible in the darkness is here seen as aflame. Of course, a physical Tiger even at night may be poetically visioned in its ferocity like this, but the sheer totality of the fire tends by itself to suggest that here is not common clay. We take poetic descriptions so much for granted that we overlook their penetration beyond such clay, and the essence of their insight which moves to show this clay in interpretative terms borrowed from some ideal sense of it. We must be on the alert to know what a poet really wants to depict, we must reject the ultra-physical only after ascertaining that the terms proper to it which a poet uses as a fundamental part of his expression are not literally meant. The all-burning body of Blake's Tyger should give us pause. Unless something in the context definitely runs counter, we should have a prima facie case in it for a glimpse of the supernatural. Until an opposite sign is found, the onus of proof would appear to lie on those who maintain the Tyger to be natural.
Secondly, the Tyger does not only burn: it is "burning bright". "Bright", no doubt, is an adjectival adverb equivalent
1. Op. cit., p. 69.
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to "brightly", but it is not confined to conveying that the activity expressed by the verb goes on very clearly. It holds more than the intense exhibition of the burning act. The real suggestion of the verb-adverb complex has been appositely noted by Harding:2 the Tyger is not possessed simply of "a 'burning' quality - wrath, passion, ardour perhaps;...the word 'bright' modifies the kind of burning suggested: it may convey incandescence, white heat, and it brings a sense of light, something glorious and shining in the quality symbolised." Our prima facie case gets enlarged. There is also an enrichment of it towards a kind of godlike in the Tyger.
Nor is the sense of shining to be considered as less than that of burning. True, burning is set in prominence as the Tyger's function, and the adverbial character of the adjective indicates splendour to be a mode of this function. But there is nothing in the syntax to import that the two can be separated or that the function can go on without this mode. As soon as we ask whether Blake's Tyger could ever burn except brightly we realize that to burn and to be bright are here a single activity expressive of an essence at once burning and bright. And we realize this with greater sharpness on marking the poetic posture of our phrase in relation to the rest of the line. The phrase "burning bright" corresponds to the double apostrophe "Tyger! Tyger!": the same being is twice addressed and the same essence is as if described in a twofold manner. The twofoldness is suggested all the more by the alliteration here matching in its own way the alliteration there and by the fact that, even as the adverb is adjectival, the verb is participial, so that the two appear like a pair of epithets equally basic.
Then there is the importance attaching to the word "bright" by its terminal place in the line, where a strong accent falls on it followed by a small pause. And this terminal place gets further filled with significance by carrying a rhyme to the "night" of the next line and emphasising what the Tyger's quality is intended to do vis-a-vis darkness. If, as is evident, "night" no less than "forests" is to be considered in the balance on one side and the Tyger and its quality on the other, this "night" can only be
2. Ibid.
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matched by brightness coupled with burning as an equal. Darkness in its own right cannot be fully matched unless brightness is present as an activity on its own.
To believe that the adjectival adverb conveys just a splendid mode of the burning act is to be obsessed by the superficial aspect of the syntax and to stress only one half of the poet's revelation. The Tyger visioned is such that it would be as correct to call it burningly bright as brightly burning, though the latter is made syntactically prominent.
The point has some importance, for, even if a bright burning is not a check on reading an ultra-terrestrial significance in the Tyger, the burning brightness is an actual spur to doing so. It is also a direct help to seeing the Tyger as Beauty no less than Power, and this in a basic way and not simply as a mode of Power's manifestation.
The point we are pressing emerges in another shape from the words of the fourth line: "fearful symmetry." The immediate meaning of "symmetry" is proportionate and harmonious structure, but the result of such structure is not only effective action, the easy accomplishment of what the Tyger is intended to do: the result is also a perfection of sheer form. "Fearful" and "symmetry" stand together in correspondence to "burning" and "bright". "Fearful" implies a destructive power, an effectivity of burning - "symmetry" implies a beauty and a brightness at smooth work. But the syntactical role is here reversed. "Symmetry", the noun, is prominent; "fearful", the adjective, is its attendant. Beauty and brightness are at first sight basic now, power and burning qualify them. The superficial import of the opening line's syntax is thus counterbalanced on its own level. But again here, as there, what the syntax throws into prominence is mitigated by the poetic posture of the phrase in relation to the rest of the line. The most striking sound-effect in
Could frame thy fearful symmetry
is the alliteration, reinforced by the metrical accent, of "frame" and "fearful". It is as if fearfulness rather than symmetry were
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being framed and in consequence an equally basic status for both is the true drift of the poetry.
An explicit resolution of the problem, bringing out under a different pair of terms the fundamental character of both burning and bright, is touched off in a later phrase referring to the Tyger's maker:
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
"Shoulder" carries the aspect of power, a massive strength set toiling. "Art" connotes skill of execution directed to an end. But what is the end here? As with all that can be called art, the end is ostensibly the making of a significant form, but ultimately the particularised expression of a creative delight arising from some illuminative "inwardness" of being and driven by a sense of perfection. And because art is such a delight it is always associated with beauty. But beauty is not to be understood in conventional terms: its patterns can be strange, they can even be fearful and twisted. In the light of this possibility the two components - "shoulder" and "art" - appear to merge, and power and beauty, burning and brightness, grow one. But the identity is not the engulfing of either by the other: hence after the phrase in which by turns each is apparently prominent - "burning bright" and "fearful symmetry" - we get a phrase juxtaposing the agencies that find expression in the twisted sinews of the Tyger's heart. Only, we must see that the juxtaposition of "shoulder" and "art" coming as it does after those two phrases, involves a unity-in-duality, a "shoulder-art" as it were, whose quality stands projected in the elements of the Tyger.
So much at present for the complexity of "burning bright": one more point will be made later. To get the complexity in relation to "the forests of the night" is our next step. What have we in that phrase? Something apparently that would carry us clean out of the physical. We have forests not of any country like India where tigers abound, but of the night. Even as one may argue that the poet is talking of just the keen savagery of the animal when he speaks of its "burning bright", one may
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urge that "the forests of the night" are no more than "nocturnal forests" or "forests at night". But why is the verbal form in either case such as to make a prima facie support possible for the supernatural? To say that the poetry would be spoiled by a different form is insufficient: an inspired poet can give a satisfying form to whatever notion suits his purpose. If the supernatural had not been his purpose, Blake, instead of writing
In the forests of the night,
could have written:
In the forests thro' the night.
There would have been nothing unpoetic and yet the burning bright would have been bounded by the terrestrial. The raison d'etre of what Blake has actually given us is an imaginative exceeding of nocturnal forests. In his line it is as though the supernatural were intrinsic to the poetic pattern and he were keeping up the type of vision with which he had begun the poem. The opening couplet is as if meant to portray a strange glowing destructive presence in some universe of unearthly darkness whose dense and devious qualities are visualised as forests.
But the poetic pattern, while combining the two phrases so as to break the bound of what the matter-of-fact might be in a literary depiction, sets this glowing presence over against that darkness. There is no denying the stark antithesis they make. So the forests of the night not only transcend jungles as of India after sunset: they also get charged with significances in contrast to those of the Tyger's burning and brightness. They loom up as cold and suppressive, callous and distorted, life-sapping and sinister. Hence the Tyger, instead of belonging to the forests and being a portion of the night, stands out as their opponent -a force that does not leap from them but moves through them as their antagonist counteracting their qualities by its own.
To pit the Tyger against the forests, no matter if they be of the night, may look like a paradox, an artificiality, from the
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viewpoint of common experience. But is it wholly so? In ordinary Nature itself a forest has two aspects. It is on the one hand the home of a carnivore and on the other the field of its predatory action, the home of its prey and therefore something against which it is pitted. A forest helps not only a carnivore to lie in ambush but also its intended victim to find cover. Inasmuch as Blake's Tyger is the antithesis of night, the poet is using in his own way the second natural aspect. Or we may even say that his Tyger does make its home in the night's forests but as their enemy.
However, there is a sense in which Blake in his own way is using the first natural aspect too, and his Tyger is at one with his forests. This animal, though the opposite of the cold and suppressive, the callous and distorted, the life-sapping and sinister, shares the attribute that they must have by being an immensity of dense darkness, the attribute of being fearful. The Tyger is "fearful" in its "symmetry" and brings to its gloomy antithesis what outdoes that antithesis in the latter's own terms. Against the fearfulness of the forests it pits a greater fearfulness. At one and the same time the Tyger is as if a supreme expression of the forests themselves and a power fighting them by its origin from their opposite. Here is a "metaphysical" tension fundamental to the poem.
Of course, if the Tyger's origin, its birthplace, is other than the forests, we should expect the poet to tell us what it is. For, unless at least a hint is given us, we cannot feel quite confident in pitting the Tyger in any respect against the forests. Blake provides all the necessary information. He clearly tells us that his Tyger is not born in the usual fashion: it is a special creation out of a far fire, it is extraordinarily made in a celestial smithy. It is such as to provoke the queries:
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?...
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil?...
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Forests cannot be this Tyger's ultimate home. Blake, within the picture he is at pains to draw, would be entirely logical in using the night's forests as not the home of his Tyger but as the milieu of its work on its victims. He does not merely give us a divergence of terms in the opening couplet: he later flashes on us the source from which, if not from the night's forests, the Tyger hails in order to move in them solely to counteract their contents by a force which is at once their antithesis and their climax.
The initial divergence of terms and the subsequent speciality of the Tyger's creation are an extremely cogent index to not only the supernatural in the Tyger but also the godlike in it.
What, however, about the word "deeps" in the query already quoted about the origin of the Tyger's eye-fire? Does it not render the animal's substance ambiguous, not skiey or godlike with any certainty even if it be supernatural? Our school-books often annotate the word with "oceans" - forgetting that oceans, though their caves may bear "full many a gem of purest ray serene", can never yield the dazzling and dynamic flame which Blake is trying to trace. Bateson3 comments: "perhaps volcanoes rather than oceans." But volcanoes no less than oceans must be ruled out - as too trivial as well as too innocent. They do not stand in sufficiently significant, sufficiently grim contrast to "skies". We must seek out that which will prepare and justify the anxious half-dubious note struck in:
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
The Tyger is godlike yet comes with a dreadful destructiveness of flame as if out-devilling any devil. The "deeps" can truly contrast to the "skies" as hell would to heaven, something abysmal and infernal to something empyreal and glorious.
Still, if the Tyger is the enemy of the forests of the night, a real depth of hell, a real abysmal existence cannot be put into our "deeps": the infernal and abysmal would go, in one sense or another, with those forests rather than with their opponent. "Deeps" and "skies", standing as alternatives, can imply no-
3. Op. cit., p. 118.
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thing except that the Tyger's eye-fire, fearful like that animal's whole symmetry, is a paradox of the godlike which would deserve to be called the glare of a hellish heaven or the sheen of a heavenly hell.
Moreover, an actual nether world of horrors and terrors, or even anything lower than the skies, is out of place when we have the line -
On what wings dare he aspire? -
about the Tyger's creator whose "immortal hand or eye" has already been mentioned in line 3. This line on aspiring should decide unequivocally that the "deeps", whatever they may specifically mean as distinguished from the "skies", are high above with them. For, to aspire cannot here signify only "to desire earnestly": its other connotation - "to mount up", "to soar" - must be added on the strength of the "wings" that serve as the means of aspiring. The concrete upward movement is too palpably suggested to be ignored - and the presence of "skies" as a region to be reached by aspiring confirms the suggestion. Indeed, the context is such that this movement must be construed as the dominant, if not quite the sole, sense.
The Tyger's creator has to fly up to attain the "deeps" no less than the "skies" for the eye-fire which he wants. And to use the word "deeps" for the highest ethereal domain is hardly unnatural: the intended paradox to which we have drawn attention would justify the usage in any case, but even otherwise the word is neutral enough to receive a variety of shades. And it is in consonance with the legitimate employment of it on a par with "skies" to designate the ethereal that Shelley says to his Skylark:
The blue deep thou wingest...
Both the words make a single description in our poem, showing two aspects of the same thing, just as the earlier phrase "immortal hand or eye" does. That phrase refers to the power of formative execution and the power of conceptive image wielded by a deathless being. How shall we similarly charac-
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terise the terms before us? We must bear a couple of points in mind. First, the connection of both the aspects with a search for the origin of the fire that is in the Tyger's eyes. Secondly, the nature of the Tyger that we have hit off as divine with a power more demoniac-seeming than any we may imagine in the anti-divine. So we may declare that the deeps are a secrecy of heavenly spaces not only fathomless but also searingly ablaze, and the skies are a manifestation of them not only ample but also transfiguringly splendourous. The deeps are a Divine Existence above as an infinite blinding profound of light, and the skies the same Existence as an infinite irradiating wideness of it. If we may revert to an old comparison, we may call the former the empyrean burning, the latter the empyrean bright.
By the way, this interpretation provides a more general fieriness above than may be guessed by taking the Tyger's eyes alone as a point de depart. Some readers are likely to get the impression that Blake meant stars in the lofty distances to be the origin of the Tyger's eye-fire. But such a view would ill accord with stanzas 1 and 5. The eyes by themselves could be lit from the stars; but if, as the first stanza tells us, the whole Tyger is one mass of flame, a source other than the starry is more likely to be required for the kindling. The stars are perhaps too small and faint to account for that mass. And if something vaster and keener in the firmament is preferable as a sufficient cause, they become superfluous. What could render the entire body of the Tyger incandescent could also put the fire in the eyes.
Then there is the specific reference to the role of the stars in the fifth stanza. Whatever the full sense of the lines -
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears -
the weeping action in them hardly suggests that the gleam in the Tyger's eyes was contributed by the stars or that the stars have the same quality as those eyes.
To return to our main discussion. The line about "deeps or skies" does not at all imply the possibility of anything nether
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for the Tyger's glow. It speaks of nothing except a region of reality that belongs to a far-away empyrean. And if the Tyger's eye-fire originally belongs there, the presumption is surely that its possessor is other than a mundane creature and that it bodies forth an attribute of the Supreme.
To dispel this presumption it is not enough to emphasize the distantness of the deeps or skies and argue that there is involved an immediate earth on which the Tyger prowls. If the earth is involved at all, it need be for the poet alone: he may be thought of as visioning from there the heavens distant from him. To involve the Tyger also on the earth is not possible unless we affirm at the same time two other things: we must take the forests of the night to pertain to terrestrial topography, and we must take the Tyger's maker as functioning in the midst of them, creating it upon our soil. If the forests of the night suggest rather a transcendence of jungles like the Indian, the argument involving the earth for the Tyger is pretty weak. And there is no sign anywhere that the Tyger's creator, who not only is winged but also has an immortal hand and eye, is functioning away from his own home, the heavens. Evidently he aspires to deeps or skies above him, but such aspiration does not mean he has to fly to them from a location on the earth: it merely means that there is an empyrean overtopping the ethereal level where he happens to be and which is nearer to the poet as compared to this empyrean. Or else the poet may be considered as visionarily placed not on the earth but in the lofty spaces themselves - on a level with the supernatural Tyger -and viewing what occurred when it was created. Then the distance would be between the uttermost empyrean and the winged immortal's station on high at the moment of his wanting to create the Tyger and let it ramp in the night's forests. In either case, we cannot locate the created Tyger as earthly: its station and that of its creator appear to be the same.
Our next job is to bring into focus the exact nature of the creator. Since he is said to aspire from one ethereal level to another, he must be a being who, for all his "immortal hand or eye", is in some manner not utterly supreme. The maker of a
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Tyger which strikes us as godlike, he must himself be divine and not simply deathless; yet his divinity is secondary and obtains the wanted fire from that which is primary. However, the succeeding line -
What the hand dare seize the fire? -
has not only the shade of audacity in handling such a fire as the original of the Tyger's eyes: it has also, by virtue of the particular word "seize", a shade of authority in relation to the distant deeps or skies, as if the divinity that is secondary could yet come forcibly with a right of hold on them equal to what the primary possesses in that ultimate altitude.
Some may suspect a violent laying of hands on another's property, on a fire not belonging to oneself. But the sense of a hostile or pillaging act is not in the least inevitable in "seize" which simply means to take energetic hold of a thing - and that other sense is not prompted either by the interplaying elements of expression at the place where the word occurs or by a backlight from the later turn of speech where again the same hand is involved and nothing save a gesture of energetic hold is doubly driven home:
what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
In the "seize" of our poem we cannot go beyond an audacious competence carrying an authoritative touch.
Another thing to be noted, as between the secondary divinity and the primary, is: the latter is distinguished from the former by a lack of personal outline. We are given a winged creative figure on the one hand and on the other a distant region at once skiey and deep - a scorching secrecy and an entrancing splendour - a supreme empyrean that is as if a blaze of light not only immense in extension but also impenetrable except by that creator aspirant on wings. All personal outline, if any, of a Godhead there is concealed by that blaze.
Now for some linguistic points about the creative "he". Critics sometimes dwell on the absence of the capital H here
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and raise certain issues. One of them is: "The Tyger's creator is an inferior spirit and not the true Godhead." Another is: "He is mentioned mysteriously as a being who is quite unknown and has to be identified." Both the issues are false: they can be avoided by a look at line 20 where the capital H is again wanting:
Surely, no inferiority or mystery could be intended for the Lamb's maker. A small h in the third personal pronoun for even the Deity seems to be Blake's general practice. And actually Sir Geoffrey Keynes4 tells us the same thing when he discusses Blake's spelling, capitals and abbreviations.
A second linguistic point about the creative "he" is: "The personal pronoun is introduced without a personal noun preceding and preparing it. If Blake had written -
What immortal's hand or eye -
this 'he' would not have made a surprising appearance. What are we to infer from the suddenness, the surprise?" The answer should be plain. The lack of preparation is only apparent. The sudden and the surprising will vanish the moment we recognise in line 3 -
What immortal hand or eye -
the figure of speech called synecdoche. Synecdoche is the use of a part for the whole or vice versa. In the matter of creation, "hand" or "eye" - the power of formative execution or the power of conceptive image - is of the very essence: if we consider a being as a creator, he may be summed up in one or the other of these powers. So the phrase can serve as a double-aspected synecdoche presenting the concentration of the whole self of the creator in the hand-function or the eye-function. When the phrase is thus interpreted, the "he" stands quite logically where it does because the framer of the Tyger has already been mentioned as an immortal: it has rhetorically been prepared by the poet.
4. Ed. cit., Preface, p. xiii.
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Line 3 has a special significance not only in regard to the creative "he" but also in regard to the created animal - a significance on a deeper level than the rhetorical and arising as part of the question of common qualities between the "he" and the Tyger. "Dread hand", "dread feet", "dread grasp" serve to declare openly a correspondence in the maker to the "deadly terrors" of the created object. Analogously we may take the activity of the shoulder and the art that have fashioned the heart of the Tyger as implying a compactly knit strength and shapeliness in the fashioner answering to the sinewiness twisted into harmonious form in this organ. The instruments and the furnace used by that art and by those limbs balance on the maker's side what must be a massive stubbornness and an enveloping heat on the side of the made. The maker's fire-seizing hand and aspirant wings match the animal's commanding gaze and empyrean-lit passion. What are we to say for the Tyger when we get the query:
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Shall we just argue that to frame a fearful symmetry a hand or eye must be immortal, for else the artifact would destroy the artificer? In the rest of the poem Blake finds it sufficient to speak of the artificer's being "dread" in order to cope with the creation of the Tyger-terror's heart and brain. Why has he not written "tremendous" or else "terrific" (quite a favourite epithet with him) instead of "immortal"? The epithet actually used appears to exceed the requirements of "fearful".
To feel its full sense, should we not match it against "symmetry" as well as "fearful" - "symmetry" which involves beauty of proportionate structure? And should we not take it also in conjunction with the words "burning bright" in the preceding couplet with which the couplet where it occurs is grammatically linked by a comma? If we do what is demanded by the form of the stanza, "immortal" by an implication of the awe-inspiringly indestructible would meet both "fearful" and "burning" on one side and on the other both "bright" and
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"symmetry" by an implication of the undiminishably divine. But then, according to the explicit or implicit correspondence we have found everywhere else in the poem, it would answer to something immortal in the Tyger. This animal, burning bright with its fearful symmetry, would belong to the same supernatural order of deific existence as its maker.
Such a conclusion is precisely what we should expect in the wake of our observation that the verbal turn throughout bears an aura of the supernatural and even the godlike, and avoids bringing the Tyger down into material phenomena as an animal of flesh and blood in a surrounding of wild vegetable growth. Also this conclusion is inevitable if we press, as we must, the lines -
for an entirely satisfying significance.
Can we take the phrase about throwing down the spears as just a poetic mode of saying that the stars shed their rays on the earth? To liken rays to spears is certainly in agreement with the poetic imagination; but, even so, can we stop with a purely naturalistic interpretation and, slurring over the definite word "spears" with its implication of war, never ask why the rays are handled like weapons by the stars? If we have a mere metaphor with no profound pertinence, there is the problem of combining with such a metaphor the next poetic step: the watering of heaven with tears. What should be the naturalistic view of this phenomenon? Stars looking like tear-drops after throwing down their rays? But did they not look the same even before? The sequence of images is pretty pointless. Even if concomitance rather than sequence is intended, there is little point. Could the sense of weeping be introduced, some point would be possible. But that sense can be introduced for neither sequence nor concomitance in a naturalistic picture: it would be a foreign element piercing through the naturalism. Unless the whole phrase which includes the spear-throwing lends itself to a deeper explanation, the sheer figure of tear-drops cannot yield
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that sense. If the former act connotes nothing more than rays hurling down, the latter cannot connote anything else than tiny twinkling spots studding the sky. Then the entire phrase will be pure decoration descriptive only of the night-sky in a somewhat fanciful manner, and all the energy and emotion of the two lines will be issueless. But such a result is absurd and proves the naturalistic interpretation inadequate.
Doubtless, Blake has made use of the similarity of star-rays to spears and of star-twinkles to tear-drops. Yet just as evidently the similarity is a jumping-board to a connotation beyond descriptive and decorative naturalism. The stars are figured as beings who perform significant acts that transcend the beaming and sparkling of luminous material bodies after sunset in physical space overhead. Like the Tyger's artificer, they belong to a mythopoeic picture: what is said about them has to be interpreted as the acts of supernatural beings. Even so, several interpretations are possible and we must choose the most convincing.
Shall we say that in the first line the stars with their rays thrown down are rendering the Tyger visible on earth and looking at it and in the second they are weeping at the sight? But there again we shall have to ask: "Why are the stars' ray-glances spear-sharp as if cast in a warlike gesture? And why is that gesture followed by profuse weeping?" Much more is obviously implied than the simple seeing of a thing on earth or even elsewhere, and obviously the seeing is connected with something done in regard to shining-sharp weapons of war.
Hardly are we helped if we take the stars as hurling ray-spears at the Tyger below in order to wound it to death. How shall we bind together this act with the act of profuse weeping? There will be no organic link between the vigorous attack and the lamenting desperation - unless we are whimsical enough to think that the stars' shower of spears at the beast on the earth missed its mark and the poor celestials then let loose a shower of tears over their failure!
Besides, what reason have we to talk of anything - ray-glances or ray-spears - as being thrown towards the earth? The
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adverb "down" is in itself neutral: it need not imply earth in contrast to heaven: it need imply no more than that the spears which were held up are cast down. Just as the tears shed are not rained upon earth but moisten heaven, so also the thrown spears may fall where their possessors are and make no descent earthwards: they may fall on the same region as the tears. When the situation is openly stated by Blake to be in heaven and one of the two acts goes no farther, this seems the most proper, the most logical construction. The image of the ray as a spear is employed only to conjure up a crowd of luminous supernatural beings who carry spears and, for some reason, throw them down within their own domain which is above earth.
Alfred Kazin5 tells us that "the stars throwing down their 'spears' join in the generation of the Tiger". How such an understanding of Blake's picture can be reached is really a puzzle. To imagine Blake to have wanted merely to say that the stars, in order to get their hands free for co-operation, put away their spears would reduce him to banality. Moreover, the tears would still remain unexplained. Should we take them as water provided for tempering, as in a smithy, the hot-ironlike substance and shape of the Tyger? That is the best meaning we can put into Kazin's statement. But it would be rather on the fantastic side and render functional or businesslike what the words offer as profoundly pathetic. The poetic tone would be ill served by it.
M.L. Rosenthal and A.J.M. Smith, authors of Exploring Poetry,6 make the couplet a remembrance of "the miraculous events on the night Christ was born". But when we turn to the Bible we find the Gospel of Luke7 mentioning the angel of the Lord coming upon the shepherds who were at watch over their flock at night and asking them not to be afraid of the glory of the Lord that shone round them. The angel declared to them
5.The Portable Blake, Selected and Arranged with an Introduction by Alfred Kazin (The Viking Press, New York), 1946, p. 45.
6.Exploring Poetry (The Macmillan Company, New York), 1957, p. 186.
7.II, 8-14.
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"good tidings of great joy" about the birth of Christ in a manger and "suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will towards men". The picture is of triumph and exultation exactly the opposite of Blake's. Surely there is no implication in it of the heavenly host throwing down their spears as a sign of non-hostile intentions or weeping abundantly because of uncontrollable joy?
Clearly, an upset of the stars is in Blake's picture: both the lines go to build it up. According to Swinburne,8 "the very stars, and all the children of heaven, the 'helmed cherubim' that guide and the 'sworded seraphim' that guard their several planets, wept for pity and fear at the sight of this new force of monstrous matter seen in the deepest night as a fire of menace to men." May we ask where Swinburne gets the idea of "pity"? What is the sanction for taking tears to denote it? Tears are primarily a sign of one's own pain, grief, chagrin, frustration, failure. In lieu of a direct pointer to the contrary we cannot go beyond these. If there is any pity here, it should be self-pity which is equivalent to the experience we have characterised. And who else is present to be pitied? Swinburne refers to "men" menaced by "a new force of monstrous matter". But Blake has no hint of the stars being related in any way to men. Even earth is not on the scene - unless we dogmatically deny to "the forests of the night" any wider and deeper significance than "nocturnal forests" or "forests at night". It is gratuitous to introduce either men or the earth or both - especially when, as we have already pointed out, Blake openly states the situation to be in heaven. The tears have nothing to do with pity for men's plight. And if they are of an experience such as we have characterized, what more natural than the throwing down of the spears by the stars as the result of being overcome by some force, some panic-striking foe?
Several annotators have approached this idea in a brief generalized manner. F.F. Monk9 may be chosen to represent
8.William Blake (Chatto & Windus), p. 31, fn.
9.Representative English Poetry (London), 1927, p. 51.
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them: "The stars are here thought of as armed angels, throwing down their weapons and breaking into tears at the sight of the terrible new thing God has created." A recent version of much the same representation is Harding's comment10 on the first three lines of the stanza concerned: "Blake asks, with scarcely believing awe, whether the Creator smiled with satisfaction in what he had made when in fact its ferocious strength was so appalling that even the stars abandoned their armed formida-bility (the spears suggested by their steely glitter) and broke down in tears." To both Monk and Harding - more explicitly to the latter - Blake is referring in an imaginative vein to the physical stars and expressing through the figure of them the effect of the Tyger's creation on all Nature, even the most remote and secure and dominant parts of it. And it is, of course, on earth that Monk's "terrible" and Harding's "appalling" new thing is seen from above. But these interpreters go outside the terms of Blake's vision and physicalise the stars because, just like Swinburne with his "new force of monstrous matter", their eyes are upon a Tyger imaged to be terrestrial. They are right in confining themselves to the stars' dismay and refraining from ascription of pity to them, but, in addition to the gratuitousness of their physical outlook, there is poetic loss if one visualizes a terrestrial Tyger as terrorizing the stars.
Even supposing the Tyger to be earthly on the ground that the word "forests" occurs in the poem, how do we get human beings into relation with the beast of prey on any evidence? And without their relation with it the poetry suffers still more. Does not the phrase about the stars throwing down their spears — that is, getting completely unnerved or showing helpless defeat or abandoning all severity - strike us, despite its vividness, as vague hyperbole in connection with the Tyger being created to prowl not in the sky but far below on the earth, and there too in forests at night-time? Again, in the phrase about these stars watering heaven with their tears, have we not, despite its movingness, a strained sentimentalism in connection
10. Op. cit., p. 69.
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with the Tyger prowling not at all amidst men but far away from them in earth's night-enveloped jungles?
If human beings are to be involved, they must be participants in a darkness beyond such jungles. It should be plain that they do not live on earth in forests - and the Tyger of earthly forests cannot be associated with them in any pointed pertinent fashion. Only if their lives - at least in certain respects - are spent in forests of an unearthly darkness - jungles of a supernatural Evil - Blake's Tyger can be associated with them. Inasmuch as any part of our humanity makes inwardly its home in these jungles, the Tyger becomes automatically an agent against it. But nothing of our humanity can be concerned in what Blake says about the stars. And, without anything of our humanity, far less is earth concerned.
No, the earth-heaven interpretation, whichever way we turn it, does not make the utterly right poetic sense out of the splendid language and the thrilling word-painting, the lofty tragedy and the vast pathos. Some mysterious event of frightful import in very heaven, jeopardizing the stars' own existence there and reducing them to impotent distress, would alone charge the whole expression with a profound felicity of significance. A straightforward reading of Blake's lines would also yield no more than such an event, for it would keep earth and men out and just stop with the stars suffering an utter breakdown, letting go of their spears and weeping inconsolably. Looking at the problem from every side, we are driven to understand Blake as describing exclusively a heavenly event. And if the Tyger has anything to do with that event it must definitely be a supernatural Tyger vis-a-vis angel-stars.
Kathleen Raine11 is in no doubt that the stars are supernatural beings. She identifies them with those in a myth of Blake's elsewhere, containing the lines:
11. "Blake's Debt to Antiquity", The Sewanee Review, Summer 1963, Vol. LXXI, No. 3, pp. 434-435. The corresponding reference in Raine's Blake and Tradition (Bollingen Series XXXV-11, Princeton University Press, 1968) is: Vol. II, p. 29. In this book the chapter "The Tyger" runs from p. 3 to p. 31.
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"I call'd the stars around my feet in the night of
councils dark;
"The stars threw down their spears & fled naked away.
"We fell..."12
Yet she sees the Tyger not as the supernatural opponent of the stars but as their own kin, a creation by their leader who is not godlike but diabolic or at least ambiguous and who, on being defeated, fell from heaven with his followers. She arrives at this conception by trying to fit the poem into the context both of traditional mythology and of Blake's complete writings, with all their references to tygers and stars as well as forests. Her attempt is a legitimate one: ultimately the poem is to be seen thus no less than by itself. We hold that even such seeing -especially when aided by a "source" little tapped by Miss Raine - will not deprive the Tyger here of its essential divineness; but at present we are concerned with the typical modern practice of viewing a piece of poetry as a self-contained unit. And, in considering Raine's view, we have to ask: "Does she offer any argument, in terms of this practice, to stamp the Tyger as evil or even ambiguous rather than deific?"
Glancing at the word "seize", Raine13 gets the impression that it implies theft - here the forcible act of one "who in order to create must possess himself of fires not his own". But, as we have been careful to observe, the idea of alien property violated is not in the least inevitable in "seize": the verb simply means to lay hold of a thing energetically. And the poem's internal pattern nowhere prompts the idea of hostility or robbery: at least lines 15-16 openly induce us to equate seizing just with grasping or clasping adequately and rightfully.
It is not by direct analysis of words and of the poem's internal pattern that Raine comes to her conclusion about the Tyger's nature. In fact, the only straight evaluation which she essays of the poem's character has quite the opposite result. It is a bit of
12.Keynes, erf. cit., p. 311 (Vala, or the Four Zoas, Night the Fifth, 11.223-225).
13.Op. cit., p. 428.
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magnificent literary insight:14 "Nor must we overlook, in analyzing the meaning of the text, all that is conveyed by the powerful exaltation of the metre, by the fiery grandeur of the images. If the discoverable meaning of the poem suggests that the Tyger is the work of a creator ambiguous or evil, the emotive force of metre and image is all affirmation, praising the fiery might, the energy, and the intelligence of the mortal God."
The expression "mortal God" applied to the Tyger's creator is borrowed from the Alchemical philosophy of Paracelsus and is equivalent to the "Demiurge" of the Gnostics. The Demiurge of Gnosticism is not the supreme God but an ambivalent power descended from the latter and he, not the supreme God, is the creator of the mortal universe with its abundant evil joined to whatever beauty and truth and goodness still strive in it. This God resembles the "he" of our poem in being what we have distinguished there as a secondary divinity; but, in our reading, that "he" with his apparent or practical status as secondary is yet essentially one with the primary divinity and, laying energetic hold of that divinity's fire both competently and authoritatively, remains undiminished in fundamental di-vineness even though his dread manifestation by means of the seized fire seems to out-Satan Satan. Here he differs altogether from Raine's mortal God. And, when we weigh her conception not with the help of Alchemical or Gnostic or any other literature and not by exploring the rest of Blake's complicated writings but immediately alongside the inspiration of our lyric, we find that the very term "mortal" is at variance with the lyric's "immortal hand or eye" as well as with the sweeping affirmation, the unambiguous praise, which Raine's single attempt at a straight evaluation of the poem's character discerns in the powerful exaltation of the metre and the fiery grandeur of the images.
Therefore, on the ground we have chosen - the poem itself -Raine, approaching it extraneously, is right in her indentifica-tion of the stars but mistaken in understanding the Tyger as
14. Ibid., p. 436.
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their kin and its creator as their leader.
And, even with the Tyger thus understood, what is Raine's final view of Blake's answer to the question of questions:
Following certain clues, she15 perceives in the Tyger's maker not only Blake's Satan, a perverting power who is named Urizen, but also a perfecting power, named Los who is drawn to fall with Urizen but who acts as "the time-spirit of evolution": "Los the time-spirit must labour to rebuild what was ruined in the beginning" by Urizen's revolt: he has to resurrect in the world the true Godhead that has become concealed or buried in it, deus absconditus. According to Raine, it is the mixture of this kind of creative or demiurgic force with Urizen's cruel and corrupting one, that accounts in the early part of the poem for "those grand images of the moulding of the Tyger" and contributes in the later part to the inconclusiveness which she discovers in Blake's answer to his great query and which is for her the master-key to the poem's ultimate revelation. The other reason for the inconclusiveness is, to her mind, an unusual insight by Blake into the problem of evil. After asking whether we are to answer the last query in some words about God which she quotes from Boehme - God visioned as all Being, both Heaven and Hell, Eternity and Time, Love and Anger - she16 writes: "This is the god of the Alchemists, beyond the contraries. But the answer of the Platonists, and of the Hermetica, would be No: the Tyger belongs to the fallen time-world. Yet on the deepest level, all these traditions converge, for the time-world exists only by divine permission. Blake, I believe, left his great question unanswered not because he was in doubt, but because the only answer is a No and Yes of such depth and complexity." Then comes Raine's penetrative observation of what is communicated by the metrical movement and the imagery: an admirable perfecting power rather than a power ambiguous or evil is conjured up with
15.Ibid., pp. 431-434.
16.Ibid., p. 336.
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emotive force. Next, Raine17 remarks that The Tyger "is preparing the way" for the "vindication of Hell or Energy" in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (written and etched by Blake over the years 1790-179318): "The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity, too great for the eye of man."19
Raine's is indeed a profound interpretation; but, if we drop the resort to "all these traditions" which she brings to bear from outside on the lyric, if we concentrate on the sheer poem, we face nothing except a violent grandeur which "exists only by divine permission" and which, unlike the explicitly defeated stars in heaven, has not the slightest fallenness attributed to it and would thus seem to stand as a portion of eternity opposed instead of being allied to them.
The basic elements of Raine's final reading are essentially in accord with ours and acquire a different tone merely to the extent that her approach is extraneous.
We may, then, continue along our own line. We have concluded, as against popular commentators, that Blake is describing exclusively a heavenly event - angel-stars suffering a catastrophic breakdown. And we have argued that if that Tyger has anything to do with that event it must definitely be a supernatural animal.
Our vision is of the Tyger and the angel-stars in a hostile confrontation. Does anything in the remainder of the poem render it possible to disjoin the animal from the stars' catastrophe in heaven? Up to the stanza mentioning the stars the making of the Tyger has been spoken of: an audacious creative being has been pictured as fashioning the animal: hence the line -
Did he smile his work to see?
should refer to that creative being's attitude to the animal he has made. So the Tyger is the "work" - a designation apt indeed for the product of a smithy, a workshop. An unpre-
17.Ibid.
18.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 888 (The Notes).
19.Ibid., p. 151, Plate 8.
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judiced look, connecting part to part, cannot infer otherwise. Swinburne, Monk, Harding - though subscribing to an earth-heaven interpretation - are also in agreement that the word "work" denotes the Tyger at which a divine labour has been shown in the preceding stanzas. Raine, in writing that "the Tyger is the work of a creator ambiguous or evil", adheres to the same denotation. A confirmation of this straightforward inference is the next line -
Did he who made the Lamb make thee? -
in which the point is precise only if "thee" refers to the question-provoking "work" of the "he" mentioned here as a maker.
But both the lines come in connection with the preceding couplet - the former immediately, the latter at one remove. The line about the work is the main clause of the sentence whose subordinate clause is about the stars and the link between the two is "when" and the two clauses have the same tense. So what the Tyger's maker did - the smiling or its contrary - on seeing the animal that was his product is an accompaniment of the heavenly catastrophe. But what would be the sense of the accompaniment if his product had nothing to do with that event? The Tyger is joined vitally with the stars' finding their own existence in heaven jeopardised, and being reduced to impotent distress. Consequently, it is a supernatural Tyger active in heaven itself and causing there the catastrophe mentioned.
The conclusion would be unchanged even if we took the alternative meaning possible of "work": not "thing made" but "thing done" or "deed". The deed here would be the catastrophe caused by the Tyger's creator through the Tyger. Heaven would still constitute the scene of the deed.
The supernaturalism of the animal involved may thus be thought unchallengeably established. And, if the Tyger is supernatural, the Lamb of the poem can be no less. But then, since a supernatural Lamb can only symbolise divine qualities -God's loving kindness and path of peace - the logical and most
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pertinent problem emerging for us from the line -
must run: "Is the Tyger the diabolic contradictory pole in Supernature to the Divine Lamb, or Supernature's divine contrary-complementary pole to it?"
On the strength of our analysis up to the "star"-lines we could summarily dismiss the first alternative. But let us ask whether in these lines themselves there is a possible support for the conclusion of our analysis. If a support from them is available, that conclusion will acquire extra force, be still more cogent and qualify as compelling.
Here our inquiry may be made by way of asking what poetic relation the stanza containing the "star"-lines bears to the rest of the piece. The term "work", as we saw, joins it to the preceding verses where the Tyger's making is visualised. But is there not an abruptness in the matter of the stars and their sad plight? Why all of a sudden are they brought up? Do we have anywhere a hint that the Tyger was meant to defeat and distress them?
There is the subject announced at the beginning with its two components - the bright-burning Tyger and its dense and devious milieu of darkness, "the forests of the night" which are its opposite in quality and which also it prowls for its prey. Until the end of the fourth stanza the former component is treated. With the occurrence of "stars" the latter may be said to re-emerge by implication. For, we may validly suggest that the stars are elements of the night and therefore in relation to the night's forests. Are they not, then, at one with the forests and, more specifically, the prey for which the Tyger prowls its dense and devious milieu of darkness? So right at the beginning of the poem, we may read already a preparation of the activity the fifth stanza attributes to the Tyger or to its maker.
Nor is the "stars"-"night" association the sole one to be discerned. The "spears" of the stars, before being thrown down, were surely carried upright. These upright spears may be seen poetically as if they were trees, so that a kinship is
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established between night-forests of trees and forests of spears held by stars of the night. The forests of stanza 1 have indeed their own symbolic function and we cannot say that Blake meant "spears" when he indicated trees. But a connection of sympathetic imagery between stanzas 1 and 5 can legitimately be taken as part of The Tyger's poetry. If the "spears"-"forests" association be challenged as fanciful, we have only to refer to Milton's poetic picture of Satan's army: it tells us how "through the gloom were seen" ten thousand banners rising, and how
with them rose
A forest huge of spears...20
Again, as if to throw into relief the subtle connection between stanzas 1 and 5, we get, immediately after stanza 5, a repetition of stanza 1 except for the slight change of "could" into "dare" in the last line. The repetition, coming just on the heels of the "star"-lines and their query-sequel, is Blake's sign of the close-weaving of the whole poem, his evolution of the end from the beginning.
The sign is welcome: it lessens our straining for the sense of the poem as a totality. The repetition, following the disclosure of a new aspect of the vision, is a response to a profound artistic necessity.
It also suggests a generalisation of the Tyger's activity. Although originally the Tyger went forth against the night's forests sprung up in heaven itself, the Divine Wrath it represents could operate wherever these forests might take root outside heaven. The terms repeated in the last stanza not only bring together the contents of the first stanza and those of the fifth but hint the extension of the first stanza's theme beyond the events that provoked the creation of the Tyger and culminated in the defeat and distress of the stars - extension to whatever participation in the supernatural principle of the anti-divine might occur anywhere, in any state of existence including the inner being of man.
20. Paradise Lost, Bk. I, 11.546-547.
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To return to our discussion. If the stars can be put in relation to the forests of the night and if the Tyger is set upon the stars, the animal cannot be anything diabolic: rather the stars must be the diabolism against which it acts with its scorching and splendoured divineness. Thus the fifth stanza itself can be brought to sustain our thesis that the Tyger is Supernature's divine contrary-complementary pole, and not its diabolic contradictory one, to the Lamb's divinity.
And indeed, when we look back at all the terms applied to the Tyger, we see that even apart from those which conjure up magnificence it is pictured only as fearful, dread, full of deadly terrors, a power formidable and destructive but not necessarily evil in any sense. There is no indication of anything essentially diabolic. Surely the Divine may terrify, the Divine may consume, the Divine may even annihilate. This truth pervades the poem. Not that the poem shows any complacence about it: the fact of Omnipotence ireful is too big to be taken in one's stride, and Blake is far from contemplating it composedly. We have interpreted his "deeps" in tune with the note of anxiety and half-doubt in line 20, and we may add that line 19 too has an anxious ring, doubting whether Omnipotence itself could be quite happy with a manifestation of its own of such frightfulness as the Tyger. Yet, for all his unease, Blake never brings himself to deny the heavenly halo of even that manifestation.
Rosenthal and Smith21 overlook the finest subtleties of the poem and stop short with the view: "In this poem the problem of evil - the existence of terrible, uncontrolled forces and their relation to the nature of God - is dynamically symbolized with naked directness." They appreciate correctly that "the forests of the night" in which the Tyger ranges are of "not Asia or Africa": a deeper and wider domain is shadowed forth. But they say that the Tyger "looms as a freely moving force" in this domain and that Blake "sees in the Tiger a mysterious, sinister vision of supernatural power" and "so we are led to think of him as ever-present, ever-dangerous, a 'burning bright' symbol
21. Op. cit., pp. 1 85, 186.
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of the savagery in every human soul and in all existence; a satanic beast".
How can one speak of Blake's beast of prey as looming? Blake's language does make it come magnified and threatening, but the animal cannot really loom unless it is something vague and obscure. Although Blake sets it before us mysteriously no less than intensely, and in that sense it can be deemed vague and obscure, there is no vagueness, no obscurity in its character as distinguished from its meaning: what constitutes its mystery is the uncertain frame of mind in which we are left by the very opposite of vagueness and obscurity. Rosenthal and Smith make it loom because they assimilate it to the forests of the night, and they assimilate it to them because the forests are given as its milieu. But what then becomes of the bright burning attributed to it? Apart from stressing the absence of any pointer to the Tyger's evilness, one may seriously doubt whether the phrase "burning bright" is no more than the equivalent of "ever-dangerous" and "ever-present". As we have already observed, a glory is evoked by the phrase, and the glory is reinforced by the later words "symmetry" and "art" as well as by the word "skies" for the origin of what the phrase "fire of thine eyes" associates with the Tyger. But the glory is quite lost if we reduce the bright burning to mean an ubiquitous peril that never grows less. More pertinent on the part of Rosenthal and Smith would have been the question: "Why does wickedness come sometimes in a most beautifully dreadful form?" But even here there is a weakness in the adverb "sometimes". Blake's Tyger comes always, and not only on occasion, in a form of the most beauty-lustrous dreadfulness. If the animal symbolizes Evil, we must take the poet to mean that Evil is ever a stupendous beauty. But is it? Could Blake have thought it so? And, even when it is beautiful, has it the sheer and unqualified glory that the fierceness of Blake's Tyger bears? We may admit that his Tyger, for all its glory, is not benign in the sense of being kindly, but we cannot go to the opposite extreme and designate it as malign. If we choose to deny its benignity, we can designate it only as stern and
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awesome - epithets not inapplicable to some aspects of the omnipotence of the Divine.
Rosenthal and Smith's reading is based on a superficial impression of the fierce intensity Blake visualized and on a misunderstanding of the role which the forests play. Fastening on the Tyger's supernatural fearfulness and sensing the same quality in the night-forests they pass by the paradox that makes a fundamental tension in the poem - the paradox of a seeming devilry that is yet totally divine in the Tyger. Missing the whole temper and atmosphere of "burning bright" they deem the forests no more than another aspect of the same force that the animal is and they do not feel how the forests, while being outmatched in supernatural fearfulness by the Tyger, stand over against it as darkness and coldness against light and fire and how the night joins up with the stars which, as we have marked, they misconstrue into a connection with Christ's birth.
The Tyger, on all internal evidence, is the terrifying complementary of the Divine Lamb and not the sheer diabolic pole to it. What it really contradicts and opposes is connoted in the present stanza by "stars" - something which in spite of being radiant is part of a multitudinous and massive obscurity, part of the state or domain symbolized by "the forests of the night."
To get the full drama of the poem properly distinguished, we must ask who the stars could be. They are radiances in "heaven" but they have changed over to the side of obscurity. What has thus changed in Heaven can be nought else than a fallen splendour. The stars must be heavenly angels who have become beings of gloom, embedded or entangled in error, alienated from the divine light and harmony. As a result of that alienation, this light and harmony manifests a destructive fire against them, comes forth burning bright with a fearful symmetry.
Discussion of the stars' specific character brings up again the subject of the origin of the Tyger's eye-fire. Their anti-divineness and the Tyger's opposition to them put them out of court for that origin. What we argued on general grounds from stanzas 1 and 5 is now confirmed by particular analysis.
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A detail for consideration at this stage of the poem is the paraphernalia of the Tyger's artificer. As he is a divine smith we can understand the presence of the hammer, the anvil, the furnace. But what role does the chain play? There are three possibilities. First, a chain may hang from the bellows for the smith to tug at in order to keep the fire flaring. Secondly, a chain may serve to keep under control the material that is being moulded. Thirdly, a chain may be used as a leash for the Tyger: it may be loosened, or even detached, to set the animal upon the enemy - it may also be pulled to draw back the animal from doing more than the master has intended. As the Tyger is a beast of deadly terrors, the aptest reading of the poem's significance would be that which would provide occasion and justification in full for this third use in addition to the two others.
The picture we have constructed involves that use. If a godlike Tyger attacks star-angels defecting from the true light and harmony, it must have been unchained or, more probably, the chain must have been slackened so as to give the animal its head. And if those alienated entities are only reduced by the Tyger to throwing down their spears and weeping in defeated distress instead of being annihilated, a definite restraint has been placed on its deadly terrors. The chain acquires a very notable raison d'etre by our picture.
Now we may sum up our reading of the poem so far and proceed to a fundamental appreciation of the imaginative-emotional attitude displayed in its questionings and to a clear determination of its total perspective. Then we shall turn to a final resolution of the poem's mystery.
A creative divinity, standing at the same time outwardly second to the supreme Godhead and inwardly on a parity with Him, obtains from the latter's empyrean of light the power and passion of a luminous wrath, a beautiful ferocity. Making this passion-power one with himself, he manifests or projects his immortal dreadfulness into action in a supernatural Tyger-form. The divine deadly Tyger goes burning through the huge and labyrinthine, cold and sinister darkness of being from
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whose forests of night rebellious star-angels glitter in their armed hostility. It attacks and vanquishes them but is held back from destroying them: their resistance is entirely broken and they down their arms and weep inconsolably over the debacle. The supernatural beast that plays such havoc symbolizes the attribute at once contrary and complementary to the one symbolized by the Lamb-form. In it is the same divinity as is manifested and projected in the supernatural Lamb. And this divinity is ever ready to overpower and punish all that in the wake of the stars' rebellion dwells in what may anywhere be called the night's forests.
But the poet, face to face with the supernatural Tyger, emphasizes the daring dreadfulness of the divinity capable of creating it. Looking at its gloriousness and knowing it to be pitted against Satanic forces, he is necessarily aware that no diabolism is here; yet with such might of devastation comes the Tyger-form, seeming to out-Satan Satan, that the poet stands bewildered before the nature of the creative divinity and before the art he practises and the means he employs. In response to the blazing beauty and terror, the hellish heavenliness, that is shown to be his nature, the whole series of questions in the first four stanzas sparks off. Although the series does not really seek the identity of an utterly unknown creator, it goes on as if it did, because Blake can hardly believe that the true godhead could be so fearful in his magnificence. Thus the mood of interrogation is also paradoxical: there is certainty behind and there is incomprehension in front and both together stir up a passionate wonder.
The wonder that is a tension between the sense of the Tyger-maker's supernal splendour and the sense of his transcendent fury grows itself a component of a larger wonder in the fifth stanza where, after asking whether the maker took pleasure in the dire work for which he was responsible, Blake puts his crowning question. Struck with the vast difference between the grandiosely terrible aspect of the Divine which the supernatural Tyger reveals and the aspect of sweetness and quietness laid bare by the Lamb of Supernature, he once more throws out
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a query about identity in spite of knowing the one source of the two aspects. He cannot deny both to the true godhead and yet must ask:
However, the manner of this identity-query is cunning in its inspiration. Even the queries in the first four stanzas, while they appear to seek the identity of a creator quite unknown, breathe an atmosphere suggesting that this creator could be none save the Supreme in some form: the epithet "immortal" and still more the couplet about wingedly daring to aspire to the topmost empyrean and seizing with the hand its fire are shot with inklings of the Highest. In the query of the fifth stanza the manner is a general one of comparison which in itself need imply no ignorance in the matter of the two makers. Two makers, both of whom might be already known beings, are set opposite each other; and they might be known already as a single being, though their singleness be a great puzzle. We may elaborate the meaning of our line: "I know who, manifesting a quality of divinely fierce strength, made you, O Tyger of Supernature, and I know who, manifesting a quality of divinely peaceful gentleness, made the supernatural Lamb. Shall I believe they are the same maker? It seems so much that they are not. In truth they are, and the Supreme in some form is both; still, how do they manage to be one, how does the Supreme reconcile such contraries as complementaries?"
Yes, the query has an inspired cunning. But it is no piece of cold ambivalence. It is charged with an intense conflict in Blake's religious mind: he attempts absolute acceptance yet suffers near-bafflement. The poem's theology reaches an acute crisis from a starting-point well summed up in words like those of a line of Blake's elsewhere:
Wonder, awe, fear, astonishment.22
A few words now on the poem's total perspective. We are likely to be told: "Why have you read the lyric as a particular
22. Keynes, ed. cit.. p. 231 (The Fi rst Book of Urizen , Ch. V. p. 18. 1.13).
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picture of a war in heaven, shading off into a general significance at the end, rather than as a general picture of Divine Wrath illustrated by a particular reference to a war in heaven? The first four stanzas may be seen as a description of that Wrath against the domain of Darkness, wherever it may be. The fifth mentions the initial occasion of that Wrath's manifestation and poses apropos of this occasion those two anxious half-doubting queries. Then again there is, in the sixth stanza, a return to the general picture. Will not such a view be more satisfactory by applying the poem directly to our human concerns instead of making them a vague pendent to prehuman and superhuman events?"
The proposed view is attractive, but will it correspond fully to the organization of the parts, the disposition of light and shade, the proportions of the various contents in the lyric? How can we separate the opening stanza's "forests of the night" from the fifth stanza's "stars"? The forests came into existence only because the stars rebelled against God. Unquestionably, they can cover other concerns than that rebellion - they are a symbol of the supernatural Darkness, within which even human beings dwell when their thoughts and desires grow anti-divine. But human beings do so as accomplices of the rebellious stars who, after their defeat in heaven, must be presumed to have carried their forests of the night elsewhere and to have attempted the seduction of entities other than themselves. The stars are not just one illustration of anti-divine activity: they provide not only the first but also the foremost and foundational occasion for the Divine Wrath to manifest. Further, the queries of the fifth stanza attach themselves to this occasion because they arise originally from it and are more pertinent to it than to anything else: the Divine Wrath is at its intensest against the stars. And if these queries are the psychological climax of the poem, this occasion is the central theme of it. Moreover, the poem, after mentioning the Tyger and the forests, deals predominantly with the creation of the former. As the Tyger's creation is bound up with the defection by the stars and is indeed the tremendous counter-stroke to it, the defection and
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the divine retributive response it provokes come to occupy the foreground in the total perspective and bear the high-lights of the composition. The application of the Divine Wrath outside heaven and to human concerns is in the background and, though inevitable, it is more suggested than expressed. It is an extension of the principal story in which Blake sees with amazement a Tyger-creative war in heaven by one whom he knew as the Lord of Love self-figured as the Lamb.
*
On the strength of our analysis of the poem's internal pattern it is easy to identify the complex situation depicted in Blake's anonymous religious myth. Evidently it is an original reconstruction of the Christian parable of rebellion in heaven against God by a group of angels led by Lucifer or Satan and opposed and punished by Christ, God's Son who is known also as the Lamb of God. Zealous in his Father's cause, Christ goes forth in battle against them with the power sought and received from his father and concentrated into a form of activity quite unlike any we should think of associating with the Divine Lamb - a mighty wrath - and yet this fire burns not to destroy the enemies of God but to defeat them completely and then expel them from heaven into hell.
Our lyric is Christological through and through. A look at Christian tradition, scriptural or literary, in detail side by side with it can confirm every feature of both its vision and its language. But just now we shall content ourselves with pointing out how Blake's Tyger-image is quite natural for the warring Christ by analogy from the description of him at peace as the Lamb of God. We have only to note two turns of thought, one general and the other specifically Christian, one as long ago as Shakespeare's King Henry the Fifth, and the other in a poem of our own day: T. S. Eliot's Gerontion.
Shakespeare has the lines, which begin with a mention of lamb-like attributes and whose concluding purport can easily be transferred from the human to the divine:
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In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger.. .23
Eliot goes directly to Christ. Contracting the accepted English derivative - "juvenescence" - of the Latin juvenescere which means "to reach the age of youth", and using it to denote the spring-time or the beginning of an historical era, the first 2,000 years of Christianity summed up as a Year, he writes:
In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger.24
Curiously enough, Rosenthal and Smith who have read a supernatural presence of Evil in Blake's animal forget themselves in their comment on Gerontion in the very same book, Exploring Poetry,25 and give their interpretation of Eliot: "Then Christ came with the power and beauty of a tiger, with the godlike energy and glory that Blake's tiger symbolizes."
George Williamson, in A Reader's Guide to T. S. Eliot,26 designates "Christ the tiger" as "an image of terror - or a springing form of terror and beauty" and, while deriving the image from the reaction of the unheroic character who is the speaker in Eliot's poem (Gerontion=little old man), he opines: "Blake may be recalled." In a gloss on the later line which expresses the speaker's remorse over man's waste of knowledge about God and over his labyrinthine errors through history -
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree -
Williamson identifies this strange tree as that of the betrayer already hinted at in "flowering judas", a rank growth symbolically mentioned by Eliot in the company of "dogwood" and
23.King Henry the Fifth, Act III, Scene 1.
24.Selected Poems - T. S. Eliot (Penguin Poets, Harmondsworth), 1948, p. 29.
25.P. 641.
26.A Reader's Guide to T. S. Eliot (London), 1955, p. 109.
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"chestnut" as a product of "depraved May", and he considers it to be now bearing or enduring "the wrath of God" which is implied in the next line:
The tiger springs in the new year, Us he devours...
This would suggest that in the second of Eliot's oblique references to Blake the terror and beauty of Christ as Divine Wrath are indirectly in the Blakean Tyger.
And, most strikingly, this Wrath is associated by Eliot not only with a tree of rank growth evoking a memory of Blake's "forests of the night", but also with tears which by being shaken from that tree stir a recollection of Blake's tear-shedding stars and put them together with those forests.
"Christ the tiger" - Eliot's flashing phrase lights up Blake's whole vision of the battle in heaven. But perhaps one touch more is to be added to naturalize in our sight the opposition we have discerned in Blake between the Tyger and the night in whose forests he burns bright. This opposition gets indirectly illuminated by some lines of Christian nomenclature from Christopher Smart who wrote apocalyptically about his cat Jeffrey nearly a quarter century before Blake rhapsodized about the Tyger:
For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against
the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his
electrical skin and glaring eyes...
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger...27
27. From a quotation by Northrop Frye in "Blake After Two Centuries" in English Romantic Poets, Modern Essays in Criticism, edited by M. H. Abrams (New York), 1960, p. 61.
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