Key Quote
“"What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"”
William Blake · The Tyger
Focus: “fearful symmetry”
The opening and closing question frames the entire poem as an unanswered inquiry into the nature of creation — the tiger embodies both terrifying beauty and divine power.
Technique 1 — RHETORICAL QUESTIONS / INTERROGATIVE FORM
Blake constructs the entire poem as a sequence of rhetorical questions that are never answered, creating a sustained sense of awe and intellectual uncertainty. The repeated interrogative 'What' and 'Could' emphasise the speaker's inability to comprehend the creator's power. The word 'dare' in 'What immortal hand or eye / Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?' shifts from 'could' (ability) to 'dare' (moral courage), suggesting the act of creation required not just skill but audacity — a willingness to bring something dangerous into existence.
The absence of answers is itself the poem's meaning. Blake refuses to provide resolution, leaving the reader in a state of permanent wonder. This technique mirrors the Romantic fascination with the ineffable (that which cannot be expressed in words) — the tiger's creator, whether God or nature, operates beyond human understanding. The questions accumulate force through anaphora, each 'What' hammering like the blacksmith's tool described within the poem.
Key Words
RAD — STAGNATE
The poem enacts a profound stagnation — the speaker asks question after question but arrives at no answer, ending exactly where he began. The final stanza repeats the first almost identically, with only 'Could' changing to 'Dare', suggesting the speaker has made no intellectual progress but has deepened emotionally. This circular structure reflects the irresolvable nature of the poem's central mystery: what kind of creator makes both the gentle lamb and the ferocious tiger? Blake leaves us suspended in perpetual uncertainty.
Key Words
Technique 2 — SEMANTIC FIELD OF FIRE AND THE FORGE
Blake weaves a dense semantic field of industrial creation through words like 'furnace', 'hammer', 'chain', 'anvil', and 'burning'. This imagery transforms the act of divine creation into something resembling a blacksmith's labour — physical, violent, and dangerously hot. The connotations of the forge suggest that creating the tiger was not a gentle act but one requiring brute force and searing heat, linking God to a Promethean figure who works with fire.
Written during the early Industrial Revolution, this forge imagery carries a secondary allegorical meaning. The 'furnace' and 'hammer' evoke the new factories of Blake's London, where machines were reshaping society. Blake, who fiercely opposed industrialisation, may be asking whether humanity's new creative power — the power to forge iron and reshape nature — is as terrifying as the tiger itself. The semantic field thus bridges the divine and the industrial, questioning whether human creation mirrors or perverts God's design.
Key Words
Context (AO3)
SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE
Blake published 'The Tyger' in Songs of Experience (1794) as a counterpart to 'The Lamb' in Songs of Innocence (1789). The lamb represents gentle, nurturing creation; the tiger represents violent, terrifying creation. Together they pose a fundamental theological question: can the same God create both innocence and ferocity? Blake challenges conventional Christianity's image of a purely benevolent creator.
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
Blake lived through the early Industrial Revolution and witnessed London's transformation by factories and machines. His imagery of 'furnace', 'hammer', and 'anvil' directly evokes the mechanised labour of ironworks. Blake was deeply critical of industrialisation, seeing it as a force that destroyed human creativity and spiritual connection to nature — the tiger's fire may represent both divine power and the dangerous new power of the machine age.
Key Words
WOW — THE BURKEAN SUBLIME — TERROR AND BEAUTY COEXIST
Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime (1757) argued that the most powerful aesthetic experience comes not from beauty but from terror — from encountering something vast, powerful, and dangerous that overwhelms our capacity to understand it. Blake's tiger is a perfect embodiment of the Burkean sublime: it is simultaneously beautiful ('bright') and terrifying ('fearful'), attractive and repulsive. The 'fearful symmetry' — the paradox of terror contained within perfect form — captures the essence of the sublime experience. Burke argued that obscurity heightens the sublime, which explains why Blake's unanswered questions are more powerful than any answer could be: the tiger remains mysterious, half-seen, burning in the forests of the night. The poem itself becomes a sublime object — it overwhelms the reader's rational mind and leaves us, like the speaker, in speechless awe.
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