Blake's Tyger

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The Tyger:

The Problem of its Symbolism

Ever since 1794 Blake's Tyger has confronted critics with its mystery no less than its intensity. They have yet to find definitive answers to the questions that beat upon us in quick succession out of the famous poem like a roll of wild drums reaching us at once from near and far:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

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?

And what shoulder, & what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,

And water'd heaven with their tears,

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

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Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?¹

Blake's beast of prey has long been recognised as a symbol. But there are levels and kinds of symbolisation. And one may inquire at the outset whether the Tyger is symbolic in any except the most simple sense of representing not solely a particular type of carnivore but all grandiose destructive forces at work in the world - forces that at once terrify and impress, cause dismay and rouse admiration. Why not stop with the chilled awed wonder whether the God who had benignly created gentle and peaceful entities like the Lamb could be the same as the God who is stern enough to create fierce ones like the Tyger - whether the same God has put into the human mind the contrasting qualities of loving kindness and devastating anger, sweet reasonableness and ferocious strength? Is it necessary to read in the figure of the familiar predatory animal, round which Blake has woven what a critic has aptly called "an obsessive chant", a more recondite truth?

With D.W. Harding, who favours the simplest reading of the poem,² we may regret the accumulating mass of divergent exegeses along elaborate paths of specialised "intellectual meanings that are too remotely and indirectly derived from the words" and determined chiefly by each commentator "following up the allusions and associations that mean most to him."³ We may also sympathise with Harding's recoil from expositions that have "a parish-magazine quality of sentiment... totally

1.The Complete Writings of William Blake, with all the variant readings, edited by Geoffrey Keynes (The Nonesuch Press, London), 1957, p. 214. (The later edition published by the Oxford University Press, London, in 1966, under the same editor, is a photographic reprint from the earlier one and does not change line or page numbering except for pp. 110 and 420 where the number of the lines has been affected without in the least affecting the references in my book. K.D.S., 1987)

2."William Blake" in From Blake to Byron, edited by Boris Ford (Pelican Books, Harmondsworth), 1957, pp. 68-69.

3.Ibid., pp. 69, 70.

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foreign to the tautness and strength of the state of mind Blake invites us to share."⁴ We may further grant the simplest reading to be not really what Blake condemned when he wrote to Dr. J. Trusler on August 23, 1799, about his own paintings: "That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care. The wisest of the Ancients considered what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction, because it rouses the faculties to act."⁵ This reading has its own subtlety in referring us to the contrasting qualities of the human mind no less than to physical or animal antithesis - a theme which, though commonplace, is yet, as Harding⁶ observes, "a fact of supreme human importance, the focus of sharp psychological conflict in individual minds and of unending theological and philosophical discussion."

But the interpretation a la Harding does scant justice to the atmosphere of secret significances the poem conjures up with its "forests of the night" and its "distant deeps and skies", the mythopoeic strangeness of vision it sets before us with its Tyger-form all ablaze, its winged aspiring immortal creator, its celestial smithy, its warrior stars who part with their weapons and break into tears - a recording as of events in a dimension other than the physical, facts of a life beyond the merely psychological, issues arising among supernatural protagonists before pertaining to the world of theologians and philosophers. How shall we confine ourselves to regarding the various turns of the language as no more than a vivid rhetoric of peculiarly cast imagery when the animal apostrophised under an earthly name seems to be part of a picture half weird half sublime such as we may expect from the Blake who claimed again and again to look into heavenly movements preceding earth's history and into the harmonies and conflicts of mighty beings in "Eternity"?

Whether or not we credit Blake's mysticism with insight into another order of reality, we have to acknowledge that he was visited by abnormal experiences as though of some Supernature.

4.Ibid., p. 70.

5.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 793 (The Letters,

6.Op. cit, pp. 68-69.

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On these experiences we cannot do better than listen to the master of the most integral form of the spiritual discipline that is Yoga, Sri Aurobindo, who was also a master of literary criticism and himself a rare poet of both Life and Spirit, with even a phrase which is the most memorable outside Blake on the Tiger -

Gleaming eyes and mighty chest and soft soundless paws

of grandeur and murder.⁷

In Sri Aurobindo's view, Blake did have occult insight, and the Supernature of "Europe's greatest mystic poet"⁸ is the "middle world" of subtle "planes" lying between earth and the sovereignly spiritual levels of the highest seers and saints of the West as well as the East. But, with his acute soul-sense and inward look and the exercise, time and again, of that "supreme power of expression" which Sri Aurobindo⁹ attributes to him, Blake, we may say, has not missed the truths of these levels. He embodies them, in the terms of his own temperament, to the farthest limit to which those truths may penetrate through the middle world in luminous myth and symbol or be shadowed forth by it in complicated parable and allegory. Thus, in its figure of "Divine Humanity", described sometimes as "All glorious Imagination", with its "Four Zoas" - Los, Urizen, Luvah, Tharmas - in their unfallen state, "Living Creatures" "pervading all,... each in the other reflected", we can see not only a more mystical version of Jung's "Collective Unconscious" and his psychological division of man into Intuition, Thought, Feeling and Sensation. In it we can also discern with Kathleen Raine¹⁰ a presentment of "the Self of the Upanishads known to mystics both Platonic and Christian as beyond the conscious self."

7.Collected Poems (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry), 1972, p. 569.

8.The Future Poetry and Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art (Sri Aurobindo Ashram), 1972, p. 529.

9.Ibid., p. 442.

10. William Blake (Published for the British Council and the National Book League by Longmans Green & Co., London, New York, Toronto), 1951, p. 25.

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For, Blake's middle world seems considerably to overpass the dubious, fluctuant mass of what we commonly term "psychical phenomena." According to Sri Aurobindo,¹¹ "Blake lives ordinarily far up in this middle world of which Coleridge only catches some glimpses or at most stands occasionally just over its borders. His seeing teems with its images, he hears around him the echoes of its sounds and voices. He is not only a seer, but almost an inhabitant of other planes and other worlds; or at least this second sight is his normal sight. "

His Tyger, to one who is sensitive to abnormal poetry, may well seem a straight capture from the higher, more concordant and significant regions of the same Supernature from whose nightmarish pits may be hailing the snakes that, as F.W. Bateson¹² remarks, "writhe in and through and around so many of his paintings and engravings, for no discoverable reason at all" and "the Neanderthal monster who turns up not only in the powerful and gruesome painting that Blake called 'The Ghost of a Flea', but also as Pestilence in 'Pestilence: the Death of the First-Born', and as Goliath in 'David and Goliath'."

It is, however, of little moment for our precise purpose whether the Tyger is an occult vision proper to mysticism or simply an intense poetic one. We are conducting a literary and not a psychological inquiry into the imaginations of a lyric written by a mystically disposed poet. We need only to remember Blake's keen religious sense and his preoccupation with happenings that he regarded as supraphysical and as concerned with ultimate realities. Our point is no more than that, owing to the mode in which he visualizes and communicates the Tyger to us, it is difficult to ignore the general impression of a supernatural symbolism.

But any exegesis guided by this impression must be preceded by a patient exact realisation of the details of the poem's posture, for then alone would we penetrate to the real meaning of the piece - one arising from its very body and not superim-

11.The Future Poetry, pp. 124-125.

12.Selected Poems of William Blake, Edited with an Introduction and Explanatory Notes (Heinemann, London), 1957, p. xv.

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posed. We must not rest with a broad survey or begin with considerations from outside the poem. Artistic truth demands that we first take the poem to be a self-sufficient unit which will yield a coherent scheme to sharp yet sympathetic analysis of the very words and their interweavings. We may remember Blake's own advice:

he who wishes to see a Vision, a perfect Whole,

Must see it in its Minute Particulars, Organised...¹³

13. Keynes, ed. cit., p. 738 (Jerusalem, Chapter 4, Plate 91, 11.21-22).

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