ENL 10B: “A Close Reading of “The Tyger” by William Blake”

Jolene Patricia Brown
Dr. T. Morton
ENL 10 B
8 February 2010

A Close Reading of “The Tyger” by William Blake

    In reading “The Tyger” by William Blake the first thing one notices is that the lines are all uniform on the page whether typed in an anthology or seen directly on the original plates done by Blake.  The lines are short and simple, organized into six quatrains of almost equal length.  The lines that might be considered longer, though only slightly, occur in the middle of the poem in quatrain three due mainly to word length and not as much to increased number of metrical additions.  The sentences in the poem are mostly hypotactic consisting of long strings of words that build more details of the image as the sentence goes on.  An example is in the first quatrain:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? (1-4)

The speaker begins first by describing what he wants to discuss, where it is located, only to end it with a question who might create such a creature. The first two lines frame the subject of the poem and the last two lines frame the question the speaker hopes to ask in his words but since they are locked into one long question the syntax is considered hypotactic.
    The rhythm of the poem consists of lines that are trochaic tetrameter with a catalexis at the end of each line: there are three trochees per line, consisting of first a stressed syllable and then an unstressed syllable, with a stressed syllable at the end of each line.  There are few variations from this pattern but not many.  One instance of variation occurs in lines 10-11 when the speaker inquires about the heart of the tiger:

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? (9-12)

Line 9 consists of three trochees followed by a catalexis at the end of the line (the stresses notated above with underlining). Line 10, however, reverses the stress to iambs, at the exact line in which the speaker refers to the heart, creating a heartbeat-like effect that continues through the next line.  There are two other places in the poem where the speaker switches to iambs: in line 20 when he asks if the creator of the Lamb is the same of the tiger, and i the final line of the poem when the speaker changes the fourth line of the poem to the word “dare” calling for an emphasis on the word that replaces “could.”  Each of these lines refer to a power higher than what the speaker would possess which is why he might want a heartbeat effect: the sound of the iamb shows a humility towards the creator of the tiger, emphasizing his weakness of heart compared to something so great to have created so much.

The rhyme of the poem is two couplets in each quatrain in an AABB pattern which have perfect rhyme with the except of two couplets that occur in the first and last quatrain which are imperfect rhyme.  The unmatched couplets are identical to one another, since the second quatrain is only a repetition of the first with the exception of one word.  The unmatched rhyme occurs between the words ‘eye’ and ‘symmetry’ which, though they end in a e sound, do not rhyme perfectly as the other couplets in the poem.  All other couplets consist of perfect rhymes such as bright/night (1-2), and aspire/fire (6-8). Each of the rhymed couplets, whether they are perfect or imperfect, are masculine rhymes because they rhyme on a stressed rather than unstressed syllable.  There are many instances of repetition throughout the poem, the most significant is the first and last quatrains which are identical except for the substitution of the word “could” in line 4 with the word “dare” in line 24.  There are several instances of consonance throughout the poem with such words as burning/bright (1, 21), frame/fearful (4, 24), distance/deeps (5), stars/spears (17) which occur on the first line of each quatrain.  This repetition and consonance unifies the sound structure of the poem for the reader, making the lines easy to read, yet they complicate the meaning of the poem subtly, especially the imperfectly rhymed lines that change in the last quatrain: that slight off rhyme and then the word change in the last line of the poem creates an unsettling feeling for the reader.  There is very little change in the rhyme throughout the poem except for the lines already discussed.

    The poem is a series of questions about the tiger; there are no statements to answer the questions posed to the reader.  There are especially enlightening images within the poem that shed insight into the speakers answers to his questions without giving direct thoughts.  The first occurs in the fourth quatrain when the speaker wonders:

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp?
Dare its deadly terrors clasp? (13-16)

Here the speaker imagines the tiger being forged, perhaps out of metal, by a hand that would “dare its [the tiger’s] deadly terrors" with a “dread grasp” in a place hot enough to be called a “furnace.”  The image is given to the reader with a dark connotation with words such as deadly, terrors, dread and dare which challenge the idea of the tiger having a benevolent creator. Instead one imagines a hell-like domain and is forced to consider the tiger being created by a more sinister force.  The tiger itself is described in the first and last quatrains as “burning bright” so this idea of it being forged in a hell-like place only helps to reinforce the original image.

    This idea is continued in the next quatrain in which the speaker presents an image of warrior-like stars who “threw down their spears/ And water’d heaven with their tears” (17-18).  The creation of the tiger would strike these warrior-stars in heaven into such awe and fear they would be impelled to tears; then the speaker wonders if the creator would smile.  The most interesting line is the final one in this quatrain: “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”  The question is one of doubt: could the same benevolent creator of the Lamb, capitalized so instantly linked to Christ, be the same as the one of the tiger?  “The Tyger” presents the reader with a series of questions regarding the form of the tiger and a curiosity about its beginnings.