Blake's Tyger

5

The Poem in Process and in Illustration

We come now to a necessary preliminary to the task of setting The Tyger in the general context of Blake's work in order finally to confirm our reading of its symbolism. We shall examine the several alternatives and corrections and additions in Blake's original draft of the poem and then the choice of the ultimate version. Doing so, we shall feel how he has moved towards the deeper meaning and tried at the same time not to lose sight of the physical Tyger altogether but found it as good as impossible to retain any positive phrase about the latter without endangering the supernaturalism of his vision. Next, we shall put the last version side by side with his own illustration of it, compare the poetry with the picture and discover that in no manner does Blake the painter of this piece render suspect our interpretation.

Blake does not appear always to have known what verbal turn took better the fundamental shade of his context. The present second stanza -

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand dare seize the fire? -

did not occupy its place definitively from the start. There was an alternative with which Blake played:

Burnt in distant deeps or skies

The cruel fire of thine eyes?

Could heart descend or wings aspire?

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What the hand dare seize the fire?¹

Here the third line, with its clear balancing of "descend" against "aspire", shows Blake to have meant by "deeps" something really below the Tyger's maker. The general suggestion is not only as of hell and heaven but also as if there were genuine uncertainty whether the Tyger's maker brought to his work a power of the infernal and abysmal or drew upon the heavenly and empyreal. A poetic posture like this does not go to frustrate whatever intention we may attribute to Blake of picturing his Tyger as essentially divine and opposing the forests of the night in which the rebel stars are glittering. For, the divine may be conceived as paying the forces of the devilish in their own coin, as it were, or even going one better in crude violence for the sake of the Good. But the mention of a resort to such means does not allow the Tyger to remain everywhere "bright" no less than "burning".

A similar situation arises in regard to the epithet "cruel". Though coloured, it is actually non-committal. Fierce strength, causing injury and pain, may be cruel but does not always on that account become evil: everything depends on the motive, the occasion, the result. Even an act of the most helpful surgery, in the days before anaesthetics, could be cruel, yet it was so in appearance only. War also in a defensive noble cause, cannot be condemned merely because of the cruelty it involves. However, the epithet has unpleasant associations and might prove misleading if the poem were about Divine Wrath and not about a diabolic opposite to the Lamb-Christ. It is significant that Blake ultimately chose a version in which it did not occur. And even more significant is it that he dropped the balancing of "descend" against "aspire" and retained only the latter, so as to avoid all diminution of the Tyger's brightness. This change altered the whole status of the deeps and, without blurring the distinct implications of them, set them and the skies together as two aspects of the same heavenly reality.

1. Keynes, ed. cit., p. 173. Keynes's text has "eye" in 1.2, which is evidently an oversight either by the editor or by the author.

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Again, the lines -

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? & what dread feet? -

had originally no interrogation-marks and were elucidated by a clear continuation -

Could fetch it from the furnace deep

And in thy horrid ribs dare steep² -

and there was a tentative third line -

In the well of sanguine woe?³

which could not get assimilated and which was followed by a couplet meant to complete the stanza:

In what clay and in what mould

Were thy eyes of fury roll'd?⁴

Blake must have found this stanza, as Bateson⁵ remarks, "a much too melodramatic affair" - and, I should add, an affair much too earthy-sounding and hence tending to be too concretely contradictory of the fine transmutation his mind wanted to produce of the physical Tyger-image. The word "clay", like "cruel", was not in itself objectionable: it would be in accord with a vision in which even the divine artificer could have a body with various limbs: a supernatural body of this kind must be composed of some sort of clay, some supernatural substance or matter. But the word's usual associations were such as might dim the deeper hue of vision. Blake cancelled the entire stanza.⁶ Afterwards he tried once to tidy up the grammar violated by the cancellation and wrote -

What dread hand Form'd thy dread feet?⁷ -

2.Ibid., p. 172.

3.Ibid.

4.Ibid.

5.Op. cit., p. 118.

6.Ibid.

7.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 214, fn. 1.

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and in a later engraved version (c. 1803) used "forg'd" instead of "Form'd".⁸ He also seems to have allowed the same verb in a "selection from the lyrics seen by Wordsworth c. 1803 and by B. H. Malkin not later than 1806".⁹ However, neither verb was a poetic improvement for his purpose. Despite the forcible language, the process of creation now became, as Bateson¹⁰ puts it, "too explicitly a piece of manual labour". No wonder Blake could not make up his mind to let such a process figure as his final choice and lead him to alter his earlier original plate from which we derive the current reading. His non-alteration can serve as a pointer to his wish to leave us suggestively suspended in the "palpable obscure", blending the made with the maker.

The most decisive act in the course of composition was to add on the opposite page what is now the fifth stanza, with the "star"-lines and the next couplet, bringing to the forefront the supernatural motif and fusing the Tyger with Christ. Even here, however, he fumbled a little and the misguiding impulse towards vivifying some kind of manual labour prompted the preposterous line -

What the ancle? what the knee? -

as either a possible part of the same stanza or the embryonic beginning of some other. But he soon rejected all gross interference and rewrote on the right side of the same page the stanza as we know it, together with a fair copy of stanzas i, iii, v and vi, which, except for the change of "and" to "or" in lines 3 and 25 and unimportant differences in capitalization, are identical with the text of the engraved Songs of Experience. In the final shape the whole poem stood in the light of the fifth stanza and subtly breathed supernaturalism and grew religio-occult. Everything tending to go against the supernaturalism was omitted or altered and the physical Tyger remained a presence in the poem by nothing more than a background suggestion so

8.Bateson, op. cit., p. 118.

9.Ibid.

10.Ibid.

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that the poem carried only an echo of its name and a simulacrum of its form.

If one argues that the corrections and additions were made simply because they brought about poetic improvement, we may ask: "Why was not poetic improvement made along the lines of physical or else psycho-physical suggestion and is it sheer coincidence that the poetic improvement submerges more and more the striped carnivorous quadruped of our physical world and increasingly converts its image into an archetypal animal divinely terrorizing perverted heavenly beings in forests of a diabolic darkness?"

Against our view a difficulty may be raised on the score of the illustration with which Blake accompanied the poem as he did all the Songs of Innocence and Experience. The picture is of a tree in the right-hand margin with a Tyger standing at its foot and facing away to the left. On the representation of the animal Joseph H. Wickstead¹¹ has written: "Whereas Blake had certainly seen lambs in the fields and children playing with them, we know that he never had seen a tiger in the forest, and one would almost say, if one judged by the illustration, that he had never seen one, where they were in those days, at the Tower. As one looks at that quaint creature in the design, one almost wishes Blake had chosen to paint its purely spiritual form as he painted the ghost of a flee." Looking at the half-cat half-dog Tyger, one may challenge us: "How can this be the Wrath of Christ against Satan and his followers in Heaven? Surely, if Blake had meant something so superbly dreadful, his beast of prey would not have been such a tame and 'quaint creature'?"

We may frame the counter-challenge: "Is this creature even a proper physical Tyger symbolizing 'fierce strength terrifying in its possibilities of destructiveness but also impressive and admirable, a stupendous part of creation',¹² as well as symbolizing by a slight extension beyond the literal sense a quality of

11.Blake's Innocence and Experiences, A Study of the Songs and Manuscripts (London), 1928, pp. 192-193.

12.Harding, op. cit., p. 68.

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fierceness in the human mind contrasted to the quality of gentleness in it for which the Lamb is an emblem?" We may further ask: "Where in this creature is the bright burning and the fearful symmetry and the deadly terrors which the poem ascribes to the Tyger?"

Evidently the illustration fails to bear out in any obvious way the words of the poem. So there is nothing at all to give our reading a complexion of impossibility escaped by any other interpretation. On the contrary, one point is in our favour. The Tyger depicted by Blake is certainly like no physical specimen of Felis Tigris. It shunts our mind completely off anything we may imagine of the intensely and grandly ferocious on the prowl in earthly forests at night. Almost a symbolic enigma in a subdued key is here, negatively rather than positively indicating the divine Mystery that in Supernature fuses Nature's most terrific beast with her most docile animal - the one Godhead who made and manifested himself in both the Christ-Tyger and the Christ-Lamb. With the negative indication Blake may have served his purpose without making himself "Explicit to the Idiot".

That his illustrations do not always correspond literally to his poems, detail for detail, may be taken as universally admitted. Max Plowman,¹³ holding that "Blake's Poetical Works consist of a succession of words and designs which are not really separable", explains: "Again and again there is alternation between words that expand the meaning of a design, and designs that give to the words their complete significance." Thus w e may expect certain words of The Tyger to exceed the import of the design while some features of the design may contain a direct or oblique , a clear or cryptic focusing of the verbal suggestion . The pictured Tyger's quaintness should be no surprise .

That on occasion Blake made his illustrations actually puzzling vis-à-vis the texts is also a fact. And at least with regard to the poems, The Little Girl Lost and its sequel The Little Girl

13. Poems and Prophecies by William Blake, edited by Max Plowman (Everyman's Library, London), 1939, Introduction , p. XXV.

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Found, two pieces which were ultimately transferred from the group of Innocence to that of Experience, there seems to be a purposive bafflement by Blake of what he calls in a letter to Butts on July 6th, 1803, "the Corporeal Understanding" as opposed to "the Intellectual powers".¹⁴ We may elucidate this procedure by summing up Kathleen Raine's interpretation¹⁵ of the poems.

Miss Raine has convincingly shown, with a wealth of minutiae what no other commentator appears to have discerned - that "the story of Lyca in the two poems... is... Blake's version of the myth celebrated in the Mysteries of Eleusis, the story of the descent of Persephone into Hades, and the search of the Mother for her lost child".¹⁶ Hades or Pluto is material Nature. The Virgin Persephone or Proserpine is the vital animating part, commonly called the Soul, descending into that world of generation. Her mother Demeter or Ceres is the Intellect, the higher part of the consciousness, going in quest of the lost lower part that has entered the profundities of Matter. Basing himself on Thomas Taylor's Dissertation upon the Mysteries of Eleusis and Dionysus (c. 1790) over and above Porphyry's Cave of the Nymphs published in English in 1788 in the Second Volume of Taylor's translation of Proclus's Mathemathical Commentaries, Blake does not make the Soul's descent an unmitigated evil but a necessary part of the divine plan: Lyca lies asleep safe in the caverns. What, according to the Neopla-tonists whom Taylor expounds, draws the Soul downwards into generation is sexual pleasure, for which it is said to drink the waters of forgetfulness and grow defiled and heavy. "Clearly Lyca's desire for sleep is of this order - the irresistible desire of sexual pleasure... Blake describes Lyca as seven summers old; but in the first design she is shown as a nubile virgin, and in the last, as (presumably) the mother of the babes playing round

14.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 825 (The Letters, 27).

15."The Little Girl Lost and Found and the Lapsed Soul" in The Divine Vision, Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake, edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto (Gollancz, London), 1957, pp. 17-47.

16.Ibid., 24.

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her. The number seven is symbolic in quite another sense."¹⁷ This sense becomes perceptible when we consider the Lion that figures in the poem. The Neoplatonist tradition of the Eleusinian Mysteries brings in the signs of the Zodiac and makes descending souls drink the starry cup of intoxication placed between the signs Cancer and Lion which are regarded as being nearest to the earth in the northern part which is the gate of generation. From the sign Capricorn , which begins the year, to the Lion is a space of seven months: "were Lyca's seven 'years' her progress through the heavenly houses, until, between Cancer and Leo , she reached the Northern Gate through which she must descend?"¹⁸ "Lyca enters incarnation in the seventh sign; and the parents, also, sought for their daughter seven days, and on the eighth came in their turn to the sign of the Lion . . . The number seven also occurs in Plato's mythology. The souls returning to incarnation, having been allotted their lives, for seven days travel across a desert, hot and dry, and at the end of this journey, reach the waters of Lethe (matter) , whose oblivion they drink and immediately 'descend' into generation."¹⁹

The discrepancy, therefore, between the child Lyca of the poem and the nubile and loverlike Lyca of the illustrations appears to be purposive. The same may be the case with the discrepancy noted in connection with our poem.

Another point may be observed. Lyca is the vital Soul, but she is not depicted in the illustrations as anything save a young feminine human being. There is no pictorial suggestion of the Soul come from a world of light into the body that is darkness. Again, there is the Lion which too is symbolic. In the myth of Persephone it is Pluto who bears the virgin away to his subterranean palace: Blake substitutes the Lion because in the Neoplatonist tradition the empire of Pluto begins from the sign Leo where "the rudiments of birth, and certain primary exercises of human nature commence..."²⁰ Blake's Lion symbolizes

17.Ibid., 33.

18.Ibid., 43.

19.Ibid., pp. 43-44.

20.Ibid., p. 36.

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Pluto, but in the designs of the poems we have only a Lion and a Lioness and no indication of the symbolized supernatural power. So there is nothing odd in the absence of a recognizable Christ-suggestion in Blake's illustration of the Tyger.

And if we examine the last "Lyca"-design²¹ we cannot fail to mark once more a quaint creature, a Lion with bulging sadly grim eyes and a half-embittered half-benevolent grandfather's expression. Our rather enigmatic Tyger, answering to none of the high-lights of the poem either in a naturalistic interpretation or in ours, has here a companion beast. This beast hardly answers to the poem's description of the Lion-King who is

A spirit arm'd in gold,

and has

On his head a crown.²²

Nor does this beast answer to Blake's conception - "the revelation to the parents that is the central meaning of the poem"²³ -that the King of Hades, "the Zeus of the underworld is in truth the same as the Zeus of Olympus, and Persephone's marriage in truth a marriage to the supreme deity himself."²⁴

Further, even if Blake had introduced into his Lion-picture the golden armour and the crown, it would still have been a Lion wearing them: the kingly spirit, "the supreme deity" symbolized, would not have been drawn. Similarly, even if the illustrated Tyger had been the gloriously fearful creature it is in the poem, its Christ-identity would not have been disclosed in terms of illustration. And from the non-disclosure we should have as little reason to doubt it as to question the presence of the supreme deity in any form of the illustrated Lion. Whether represented as quaint or impressive, the Tyger would equally be the symbol we have made it.

No objection to our thesis on the ground of Blake's picture of his Tyger can be sustained, any more than on the ground of the stages in the verbal making of the poem.

21.Wickstead, op. cit., between pp. 114 and 115.

22.Raine, op. cit., p. 45. 23. Ibid.

24. Ibid.

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