The Tyger
"The Tyger" is a poem by the English poet William Blake. It was published as part of his collection Songs of Experience in 1794. It is one of Blake's best-known and most analyzed poems. The Cambridge Companion to William Blake (2003) calls it "the most anthologized poem in English."[1][2] Much of the poem follows the metrical pattern of its first line and can be scanned as trochaic tetrameter catalectic. A number of lines, however—such as line four in the first stanza—fall into iambic tetrameter.
Most modern anthologies have kept Blake's choice of the archaic spelling "tyger". It was a common spelling of the word at the time but was already "slightly archaic"[3] when he wrote the poem; he spelled it as "tiger" elsewhere,[1] and many of his poetic effects "depended on subtle differences of punctuation and of spelling."[4] Thus, his choice of "tyger" has usually been interpreted as being for effect, perhaps to render an "exotic or alien quality of the beast",[5] or because it's not really about a tiger at all, but a metaphor.[1]
"The Tyger" is the sister poem to "The Lamb" (from "Songs of Innocence"), a reflection of similar ideas from a different perspective (Blake's concept of "contraries"), with "The Lamb" focusing more goodness. "The Tyger" presents a duality between aesthetic beauty and primal ferocity. The speaker wonders whether the hand that created "The Lamb" also created "The Tyger”.
References [edit]
- ^ a b c Morris Eaves. The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, 2003. ISBN 978-0-521-78677-5 – pg. 207
- ^ The popular anthology The Top 500 Poems (1992) edited by William Harmon makes the same claim of ultimate popularity, as measured by anthology appearances.
- ^ Duncan Wu, David Miall. Romanticism. 2000. ISBN 978-0-631-22269-9 pg. 77 – "Tyger: this spelling was already slightly archaic by Blake's time."
- ^ Edward Jenks (editor). The Independent Review. pg. 217 – "many of his effects depended on subtle differences of punctuation and of spelling.."
- ^ Poems by William Blake – study guide
See also [edit]
External links [edit]
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- Full text of the poem
- The Tyger Bibliography at the Wayback Machine (archived May 9, 2008)
- The Taoing of a Sound – Phonetic Drama in William Blake’s The Tyger Detailed stylistic analysis of the poem by linguist Haj Ross
