The Tyger , Poetic Techniques?

Question

I was wondering what the techniques of william blakes poem are. Also any comments on the poem would be appreciated

Answer 1

The Tyger is a truly astonishing poem.  If you read more Blake, you will also find it is a microcosm for his epic poetry.

First: The poem is in a relentless metre.  Traditionally English is iambic, meaning lines begin unstressed, usually because of prepositions or articles.  This poem is trochaic, because Blake begins addressing the Tyger directly.  Elsewhere he doubles up prepositions with question words (what, where, etc.) to drive the rhythm and the wonderment.  Most lines also end with a strong beat, so this is a very stressed poem.  Most lines have seven syllables: four stressed, three unstressed.  A few have eight: four of each.

Second: The rhythm of the poem is the same as `Twinkle, twinkle, little star;' so is the questioning.  The words to the song are slightly older than The Tyger, if I recall; they were penned by a lady for a book of childrens' poems.  The music is quite a bit older, and Mozart wrote variations on a French song with the same tune, a few decades before The Tyger.

Third: The poem is probably about the Tyger's eyes, which the poet compares to stars.  `Burning bright' probably refers to the fact that tigers have eyes like cats, which reflect light to improve their night vision (the organ which does this is called a tapetum).  This explains the second stanza: in what distant deeps or skies/burnt the fires of thine eyes?

Fourth: This quickly becomes a question of good and evil.  `On what wings dare he aspire/ what dread hand dare seize the fire' is about Prometheus, and also about Lucifer (bearer of light).  `Seize the fire' probably deliberately sounds like Lucifer.  In this poem the Tyger is a source of terror and power, including the potential but not necessarily the actuality of evil: this is why in a later stanza the poet asks, `did he who made the lamb make thee?'  This is essentially the question: if God is good and powerful, why does evil exist?

Fifth: By the third and fourth stanzas, the poem become abstruse because it addresses Blake's private mythology.  In this system, a god named Urizen was both father of the universe and origin of evil.  (Blake spoke in internet slang: Urizen means `your reason;' Blake was also anti-rationalist).  Urizen ludicrously caused the fall of creation by codifying laws.  After the fall, another god named Los (as in: profit and loss) bound the stars, which were the fragments of heaven, together into the sun, which Blake considered half-merciful and half-tyrannical.  That is partly what Blake means by `what dread hand dare seize the fire.'  There are a number of other Blake poems in which the sun is compared to an eye.

Sixth: The stanzas about the hammer, the anvil, the furnace, and the brain involve Los the blacksmith of fallen creation forging the sun in his smithy.  The brain is Urizen's brain: remember Urizen is `your reason.'

Seventh: Blake's idea is that the sun is like the `Holy Son.' (Shakespeare also used this play on words.)  The poem is called The Tyger, and crucially asks about the lamb, because Blake believed that the mercy of the Holy Son (Jesus Christ) was partly tyrannical.  He sees this paradox in that he is both `The Lamb of God' (as in the English patriotic song, Jerusalem, words by Blake), and `The Lion of Judah.'  The Tyger was part of a series of poems called the Songs of Innocence and Experience, as I am sure you know; one of the other poems involved a lion who was king of the tygers (The Little Girl Lost, I think).  

Eighth:  This takes us to the crux of the poem:

When the stars threw down their spears

And watered heaven with their tears,

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the lamb make thee?

And now you understand the whole poem!  Nobody knows why Blake changed Could to Dare, when the last line of the last stanza was otherwise the same as the last line of the first stanza.  Drafts of the poem exist in which Blake did not make that change.  Unfortunately there is probably no good reason in an otherwise perfect poem.

Answer 2

You have to be more specific about what you mean by "techniques". Do you mean rhyme scheme? Meter? His inspiration for such things?

It is a companion piece to "The Lamb." Each poem in Songs of Innocence and Experience had a counterpart.

There are many interesting interpretations of the poem. One could spend several days surfing the net for such, but alas, nothing beats the experience of just reading the poem.