“Tyger Tyger, Burning Bright,In The Forests Of The Night; what Immortal Hand Or Eye, could Frame Thy Fearful Symmetry?” Essays Examples

This passage is taken from William Blake’s poem “The Tyger” (1794). William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet and painter. Blake was not recognized during his lifetime. But nowadays he is considered as a great figure in the history of the English poetry and visual arts during the Romantic Age. “The Tyger” is considered as the most famous poem of William Blake. It is often quoted in different areas of culture and art, i.e.: cinematography, theatre and music.
The first passage was chosen for the analysis because of its main function of introduction and invitation. The passage under analysis belongs to the belles-lettres style, which main aim is to entertain the reader and produce the aesthetic mood. This poem from the “Songs of Experience” is a contradictory to another one from ‘The Songs of Innocence” – “The Lamb”. The first passage of “The Tyger” is written in four lines. The poem comprises of 6 stanzas, each written in four lines. The first one can be scanned as a catalectic metrical pattern. The rhyme of this poem is of masculine type, it is a tail pair rhyme: bright-night; eye-symmetry. The author implies assonance as the form of his rhyme. As the reader can notice, the stress in the word “symmetry” is changed due to the author’s way of rhyming. The first stanza of the poem introduces to the reader the implication of foreknowledge. Its main aim is to excite the reader’s interest. The general tone of the speaker is quite enigmatical. The reader through the main opening question of the poem “What immortal hand or eye,/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” feels a real awe of something powerful and unknown. Here the reader cannot but notice the direct address “Tyger Tyger” introduced by lexical repetition.
According to the phono-graphical expressive means, this passage is filled with alliteration: “Tyger Tyger, burning bright, / In the forests of the night; // frame thy fearful”. The effect of strengthening the stress is achieved together with an amount of imagery, expressed with the means of metaphors, such as ‘burning bright’ and ‘What immortal hand/ Could frame’. The epithet ‘burning’ enhances the feeling of the author, drawing the attention to a real strength of the unknown. As the reader sees in the following lines “What immortal hand or eye, /Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” the main subject of the poem is raised “Who is the Creator?” and “Can the Creator save us from the inevitable, from the evil?” Again, the effect of strengthening is achieved by the epithets ‘immortal’ and ‘fearful’. The metaphors ‘hand, eye and symmetry’ show the reader an allusion to God as the Creator of this powerful ‘animal’. Through this passage, the author represents the juxtaposition of authentic beauty and primal brutality. Everything should be balanced: if exists “The Lamb”, as the metaphor to people of good will, there should be something opposed to it, “The Tyger”. The author uses an effect of framing. The poem begins and ends with the same passage, so it restarts the question. But one word in the last line of the poem is changed. It’s not “could” but “dare”. The author asked “Who created the Tyger?”. But the last one turns out the other one: “Who dared to create the Tyger?”, and “Can it possibly be the same being who created the Lamb?” The author wonders whether it was possible to create something that innocent and that cruel at once, by the same Creator.