Summary (Masterpieces of World Literature, Critical Edition)

“The Tyger,” from Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794), is probably Blake’s most famous poem. Its artful simplicity and pounding repetitions make a strong impression when the poem is read aloud. The meaning of “The Tyger,” however, is not so easy to ascertain, and it has provoked a wide range of interpretations. The poem consists of six quatrains, each of which asks at least one question about the nature of the tiger’s creator. None of the questions are answered. The central question of the whole poem appears in the fifth quatrain, “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” This question recalls the poem “The Lamb,” from the same collection, in which the question, “Little Lamb, who made thee?” is answered clearly. The lamb is made by Christ and is an obvious symbol of the mild and gentle aspects of Creation, which are easy to associate with a God of love. However, what about the more fearsome, destructive aspects of Creation, symbolized by the tiger? Do they proceed from the same God? Under what circumstances? Is the tiger only a product of the Fall of humankind? Or are there, perhaps, two Gods?

Crucial to interpretation are the first two lines of the fifth quatrain: “When the stars threw down their spears,/ And water’d heaven with their tears.” This event appears to take place, from the evidence of the following line (“Did he smile his work to see?”), at the moment of the tiger’s creation. It may be a reference to the fall of the rebel angels in Milton’s Paradise Lost: “they astonished all resistance lost,/ All courage; down their idle weapons dropped.”...

(The entire section is 665 words.)