There can be no brief summary of "The Tyger" or to what Blake scholars Robert A. Gleckner and Mark L. Greenberg call "`Tyger' studies". The rare cultural status the poem has achieved can be reduced at last to raw empirical terms: William Harmon ranks "The Tiger" [sic] first among The Top 500 Poems anthologized in English, a fact that reflects how closely, in popular imagination alone, Blake is tied to his creature.
"The Tyger" has also been one of the most frequently explained poems in English literature. In fact, the width and depth of attention the poem receives testifies to its ability to contain a multitude of plausible, if widely divergent, interpretations. And critics have gone even farther, subdividing the lyric into parts, so that many articles are devoted only to individual segments of the poem-- the state of the speaker, the tiger's spiritual alignment, and certain memorable cruxes in the text. Indeed, one surveys the sheer acreage of "Tyger" criticism and no longer sees a mere lyric, but finally a kind of massively succinct lexicon for William Blake's intellectual, political and spiritual life.
Nineteenth-century readers who had at least a glancing familiarity with William Blake would have had known "that one about a tiger," as Charles Lamb remembered it when the name of the poem escaped him. The poem's pulse-like meter and its simple, suggestive lyrics fastened themselves to the memories of even Blake's most virulent attackers. William Beckford, for example, the aristocratic man of letters and contemporary of Blake's, left this nearly forgotten commentary: "`Tiger, tiger burning bright In the forests of the night etc.' Surely the receiver and disseminator of such trash is as bad as the thief who seems to have stolen them from the walls of Bedlam." While posterity has not yet supported his verdict, he stands at the head of a tradition that remembers Blake first and sometimes exclusively as the author of "The Tyger".
This was partly due, of course, to the poem's better exposure. Eva Rosebery, who records Beckford's remark, notes that "the disseminator of such trash" in question was Benjamin Heath Malkin, an early admirer and acquaintance of the poet. Malkin, as G. E. Bentley, Jr. notes in William Blake: The Critical Heritage, included "The Tyger" among five other poems in his volume, Father's Memoir for His Child, published in 1806.
Bentley also reports Allan Cunningham's comment in the 1831 Lives of Eminent British Painters that the "little poem called `The Tiger' has been admired . . . by poets of high name." In reality, such contact was only brief and incidental, though the poem was in fact well received by a prestigious audience. William Wordsworth saw Malkin's volume and was "sufficiently impressed" to copy "The Tyger" and other of Blake's lyrics into a commonplace book in 1807. Charles Lamb, who had only heard the poem recited, found it "glorious" even as he misquoted it (Bentley reproduces Lamb's "Tiger" as: "Tiger, tiger, burning bright,/Through the deserts of the night"). In 1818, Samuel Taylor Coleridge reviewed the illuminated manuscript itself; he liked the poem, though it did not inspire any direct remark.
Aside from a illuminated, though largely ignored edition of the collected Songs of Innocence and of Experience in 1828, "The Tyger" spent much of its nineteenth century life in the conventional typescript of journals and anthologies. This period, Bentley shows, begins in 1811 with the publication of an article by Henry Crabb Robinson in the German periodical Vaterl<ä>ndisches Museum. Robinson's short biographical introduction of Blake re-printed "The Tyger" which he praised as a "truly inspired and original description" of the beast. Between 1847 and 1862, the lyric was the only one of Blake's works to be reproduced in all four anthologies that included him. Of the thirty-seven poems by Blake published during this time, Suzanne Hoover notes, "The Tyger" "was the most popular, having been printed as many as seven times." In fact, the presence of "The Tyger" was perhaps a leading reason that Blake's name escaped complete obscurity before Alexander Gilchrist's biography of Blake in 1863 brought Blake a wider, more respectful audience.
In 1954, David Erdman, in Prophet Against Empire, was the first to offer an account of the poem solely in terms of its contemporary background, and evidence for other, equally plausible sources of the poem, have steadily mounted. In the last twenty-five years alone, critics have clarified even more distinctly the poem's relationship to its own era.
Nick Shrimpton and Heather Glen have shown that the Songs of Innocence and of Experience owe in part their metrical models and topics from a whole current of childrens' literature that had become available to a larger, literate English public. For a poet who was at home with blank verse and artistic experimentation, "The Tyger"- - with four beats evenly striking almost all of its lines-- was very much an appropriation of this fairly new literature. Glen, in fact, places "The Tyger" among those "verses about birds and animals, of which there was a whole sub-genre in the children's books of the late eighteenth century." One cause of the growing literacy for children was a strict Methodist ethic which reared children as much for their future salvation as their adulthood. No one person typifies this ethic better than John Wesley, perhaps the foremost leader of English Methodism, who wrote hymns and rhymes that prepared children to accept death, among other pains, as a consequence of the reward of salvation (a doctrine which, Shrimpton asserts, that "The Tyger" (in part) "questions the adequacy of.").
Some critics trace the poem's minor imagery, particularly the stars and spears of its fifth stanza, to events or institutions familiar to Blake in his own lifetime. In 1990, for example, Marilynn Olson and Donald Olson suggested that meteor showers-- especially one spectacular bolide on August 18, 1783-- may have been the "spears" the "stars threw down" in line 17. Colin Morton D. Paley notes that the weeping stars in lines 17-18 may refer to the anonymous lyric "Tom of Bedlam," reprinted popularly in 1792. And in the Songs of Experience, "The Angel" offers a close parallel to the lines:
Tigers, as many scholars have discovered, held a special
terror for the eighteenth century imagination. John E. Grant, writing in the Iowa Review in
1989, reproduces two pages from Thomas Bewick's A General
History of Quadrupeds (published 1790, 1811), describing the
tiger as "the most rapacious and destructive of all carnivorous
animals." Bewick's tiger is "fierce without provocation, and cruel
without necessity, its thirst for blood is insatiable."
Not surprisingly, editorialists, particularly British
conservatives, were not slow in realizing the tyger as an invective
against Jacobin France. David Erdman notes
that on January 7, 1792, The [London] Times declared that
the French had become "`loose from all restraints, and, in many
instances, more ferocious than wolves and tigers'."
The metaphor proved to be exceedingly durable. Judging from
the word's frequency in this context, it is not hard to conclude
that "tiger" had become a trope with conditioned reflexes, to be
released any time discussion headed in the vicinity of
revolutionary France. Wordsworth's familiar description of post-
revolutionary Paris (which Erdman cites in Prophet Against
Empire) as a place where Robespierre's enemies were as
"Defenceless as a wood where tigers roam" (Prelude, X.82)
merely draws on an already popular image of the tiger as a beast of
insolent ferocity.
Or the English may have heard, as Morton D.Paley notes, Sir Samuel Romilly inflecting the
low bestiality of the new French republic: "One might as well as
think of establishing a republic of tigers in some forest of
Africa." From comparisons of animals, conservative editorialists
were not far from using the epithet the "tygerish multitude"-- a
variant of Edmund Burke's "swinish multitude"-- against the lower
and artisan classes of England and France, who, as Stuart Crehan remarks, were "daring to assert their own
power."
But the word could be aimed at individuals as well. The
London Times on 13 July 1793, Crehan
notes, published a "eulogy" for the assassinated David Marat,
remembering him as "a fine portrait of [a] chief murderer with eyes
of a tyger cat, and . . . looks that corresponded to that animal."
In 1793 as well, says Colin Pedley, the
English public heard Robespierre (and his followers) described as
"that Tiger, in human shape surrounded by the assassins whom he
dispatched."
Robespierre, Pedley notes, later tacitly endorsed the epithet,
demonstrating some of the ambivalent power the word that Blake
could draw on for the poem. In the experienced world that followed
the French Revolution, says Ronald Paulson in
Articulate Images: The Sister Arts from Hogarth to
Tennyson, words took on dual, but antipodal values:
king, traitor and, as Robespierre demonstrated,
tiger.
The tiger survived revolutionary France to become a figure of
Napoleonic militarism as well. Grant
uncovers a fairly obscure, if virulently Anti-Gallican, caricature
by cartoonist James Gillray. In it, the allegorical skulls of
European nations lie beneath a French coat of arms whose central
symbol is a bloody guillotine flanked on one side by a tiger (and,
on the other, an undoubtedly racist depiction of a monkey). Such
was the context of tigers in post-revolutionary Europe and Grant
insists that any honest reader will acknowledge that "Blake
selected a beast that truly could not be confronted with
equanimity."
But the tiger's prominence in the mental life of eighteenth
century England also owes to "the great upsurge of natural history
in the eighteenth century," says Coleman O. Parsons. He notes that illustrations of exotic
and foreign animals were frequently included in texts like
Linnaeus's compendium. The "tiger" literature of the day was large
enough, says Parsons, to create "an ambience of fact, fable, and
interpretation which nourished Blake's imagination."
More immediately, Paul Miner suggests,
"Blake could have seen a real tiger in eighteenth century London."
Travelling menageries came to the city, including one, Miner
documents, with a Bengali tiger in 1791. Superstitions grew around
these menageries' tigers as well. John Adlard
does not mention "The Tyger" by name in his book The Sports of
Cruelty, but relevantly he explains that among the
superstitious it was believed that every seventh year lions bred,
and this accordingly was called "The Lion Year". However,
"apparently this seventh year was sometimes the Tiger Year, for .
. . a strange, sudden fury of a tiger in a travelling menagerie was
blamed by the manager on the presence of pregnant women."
Whether any of these were the source of Blake's poem, or their
effect on him was composite, the animal clearly led a powerful
imaginary life in Blake's audience.
Despite the volume of published work on the poem this century,
"The Tyger", as a critical phenomenon, really only began after the
Second World War. Before then, only a few critics like Joseph H.
Wicksteed offered thoroughgoing accounts
of the kind that would become more common later.
One great difference between pre-War "Tyger" criticism and the
later more densely-argued criticism of the 1940s and after, lies in
the number of footnotes each uses. Wicksteed's 1928 study of the complete
Songs, not burdened with competing theories or abstruse
extra-textual sources, approaches "The Tyger" with uncluttered
conviction: "The whole thesis of `The Tyger' is that he [the
tiger] is a spiritual expression of the Creator himself" and the
poem "is a tremendous treatise enunciating the nature of the God
that does exist-- the God that is mighty and terribly
visible in his manifestations." (In 1957, however, D. W. Harding complains that "the parish-magazine
quality of sentiment [Wicksteed] expresses . . . is totally
foreign" to Blake.)
S. Foster Damon, in 1924, was among th
first to interpret the poem as essentially a doctrinal problem:
"how to reconcile the Forgiveness of Sins (the Lamb) . . . the
Punishment of Sins (the Tyger)." (277) The final question, "Did he
who made the Lamb make thee?" (l. 20), is therefore "not an
exclamation of wonder but a very real question, whose answer Blake
was not sure of."
The Portable Blake, published in 1946, edited by
Alfred Kazin, which included a short
commentary on the poem, can be taken as the official beginning of
modern "Tyger" studies. Two years later, Roy P. Basler, within an embryonically Freudian reading,
saw in the ambiguous morality of the tyger "a challenge to orthodox
theology" as well as to "the rational design" of the universe
prevailing among the so-called Natural Theologians of the
eighteenth century. (This critique had a distant echo almost three
decades later in June Singer's Jungian
psychobiography of Blake, The Unholy Bible (1970): "He
who made the Lamb is worshipped in all the churches, [but] he who
fashioned the Tyger . . . is also God.")
The year following Basler's work, C. M. Bowra published The Romantic
Imagination, and found in the tyger a symbol "for the fierce
forces in the soul that which are needed to break the bonds of
experience." Also in 1947, novelist and critic Wolf Mankowitz offered that the poem was "a
comment on the limited capacity of man to conceive of God at
all."
These studies, however, seem brief surveys compared to the
more systematic treatment of Jesse Bier. For
Bier, writing in 1949, Blake's poem is a record of the struggle
between energy and matter; the tyger is "the face of creation"--
"not sheer unadulterated evil and perversity in the outer world,
but like Moby Dick . . . the marvelous and the fatal together
within each of us." The structure of this reading is revived and
put to somewhat different ends by Anne Kostelanetz Mellor in 1975, who viewed the poem as
"portray[ing] the process through which Energy is given artistic
form is thus enabled to survive in the world of Experience."
Two other critics of the 1940s, re-introduced and made
important clarifications to the Christian eschatology latent in the
poem. Northrop Frye, in Fearful
Symmetry (1947) sees in the poem a Satanic accuser of the
Fall, "who frightens us out of Paradise behind the menacing blaze
of a tiger's eyes." Conversely, Jacob Bronowski, writing in 1944, interprets the
poem as one guide-post on a road to a complex religious redemption.
"Christ is become the Tyger, symbol of energy burning in a
darkening world," he writes prophetically, "It is no longer enough
for the innocent boy to go from false experience to true, by
chance. Experience itself must learn, fasting in the desert, to
follow a greater innocence, by choice."
Mark Schorer was another critic in the
1940s to produce a major book-length study of Blake, The
Politics of Vision (1946). Unlike S. Foster Damon, for
example, he seeks to answer the final question of the poem by
describing tiger and lamb as aspects of the same historical
process. After centuries of oppression, "the innocent impulses of
the lamb have been curbed by restraints, and the lamb has been
turned into the tiger," and the new animal "bursts forth in
revolutionary wrath."
David Erdman extends Schorer's argument
into Blake's own historical context. Erdman is careful "not to
imply the "The Tyger" is a political allegory," but finds ample
political resonance in the contemporary events of France and
America. But the poem culminates in the fifth stanza when the
counter-revolutionary "stars threw down their spears" like the
surrendering armies at Yorktown and Valmy, long at their wars (in
the American and French revolutions, respectively), and "seemed
ready to coexist with the Lamb." The cycle is complete, when "the
wrath of the Tiger"-- both revolutionary and counter-
revolutionary-- "done its task."
Stuart Crehan, writing in 1984, follows
Erdman in correlating the poem with the revolutionary mood of the
1790s. The honestly partisan Crehan compares the poem to Yeats's
"Easter 1916" as it depicts the "terrible, new-born beauty of
violent revolution." But the tyger acts out of-- indeed, is
created out of -- misery and desperation. For if "the forests . .
. are, on one level, oppressive and crowded cities such as Paris
and London, then it follows" that it is such "degradation, not some
unfathomable Creator in the sky, that have bred tigers."
The project of reconciling the lamb and the tiger also
continued during the 1950s. Stanley Gardner, in his 1954 book Infinity on the
Anvil, harmonizes the two, if only for stanza five,
maintaining that the "stars [who] threw down their spears" were
giving up "material power." With "instruments of strife cast
aside, and pity assumed," the tyger's Maker "smiles upon the
triumph of the Lamb." Gardner is especially vivid in his
discussion of the tyger, which he decides is a product of fiery
Los-like creation: "With its five finite senses, forged round the
infinite mind, separates that mind from infinity," the body is
created out of fiery separation. Hazard Adams, writing in 1955, locates this struggle
internally, seeing in the tyger "a mirror image of man in his
fallen state." In an article which anticipates his 1960 essay
("Reading Blake's Lyrics"), Adams interprets the tyger's
"identification and confrontation by Blake and Los [as a]
symbolical leap from the forest [of the night] into the light of
day."
Warren Stevenson (1969) joins Gardner
in identifying Los as the creator: "In forging the Tyger, Los is
accomplishing that same victory over . . . darkness which he
accomplished in The Book of Urizen." Also in the Los
column is Harry Williams (1972) who sees
the tyger as a realization of that "spirit of forgiveness" which
itself is composed of equal parts wrath and pity (in the spirit of
the hellish proverb, "The cut worm forgives the plow"). Fred Kaplan (also in 1972) regards the poem as a
moment of the recognition of one's own claim to divinity. "Blake
the artist," says Kaplan, "does not fear to record his immortality;
in fact, he stands in awe before his own fearlessness."
Harvey Birenbaum, in his 1992 study
Between Blake and Nietschze, never mentions Blake's god of
labor by name, but the Maker he describes and Los have nearly the
same personality and face many of the same problems. However, the
two finally diverge, as Birenbaum sees in the poem a lack of
ethical intent: "the only moral question remotely implied is
whether the reaching mind ought to do all it dare."
Urizen, Blake's repressive lawgiver god, was also named the
tyger's father during the 1950s. Kathleen Raine argued in Encounter in 1954,
drawing on ancient Gnostic texts, which were, she argued, "beyond
question. . . . the inspiration and source of the `The Tyger'."
From Gnosticism's belief "that the creator of this world was a
being different from the supreme God," Raine easily finds numerous
distinct parallels from Blake's own Gnostic demiurge, Urizen. The
tiger, then, is the representative of "a very Cruel Being" who was
responsible for proportion and "symmetry"-- clearly the work of
Urizen. Furthermore, following the legacy of Urizen, she asserts
(in what would become a frequently attacked phrase), "the tiger is
a symbol of competitive, predacious selfhood."
(It should be noted that Margaret Rudd, a
year before Raine, saw in the poem as a fragment of Blake's own
religious struggle in which Urizen made laws, but not the tyger
itself. For Rudd, "it is only an abstract law of Urizen which
calls the Tiger, like sex, evil.")
While Raine's conclusion of Urizen as Maker was endorsed
without alteration by S. Foster Damon, in his
Blake Dictionary (1965), others offered variants of her
interpretation. Robert F. Gleckner, in
1959, said the tyger belongs to "the finite world, ruled over by
Urizen who caused its finiteness the world of experience and
tygers." The creator's possible smile in fifth stanza ("Did he
smile his work to see?) is the smile of spite, cynicism, cultivated
by repressive experience. He elaborates this demiurgic universe
further than even Raine had, describing "the
forests of the night" as "the forests of experience in which roam
fears and sorrows of the created universe."
Rodney Baine and Mary Baine seem to share Raine's thesis that
the tyger belongs to Urizen, though they do not name the god as
such. But, they say that Blake used "the tiger as symbol of fallen
or brutalized man. Only when he is regenerated or redeemed does
the tiger, like the other beasts, reassumes his unfallen creative
vitality." (In 1986, Rodney Baine,
intensifies his view and indeed begins to adopt Raine's familiar
phrase: "Like the Tyger, Blake's subsequent tigers also exemplify
man in the grip of selfhood-- malevolent and stupid.") For Robert
E. Simmons, writing in 1970, the tyger is an
"illusion" which "amounts to a symmetrical precis of Urizen."
Thomas R. Frosch (1974), in similar language,
blames Urizen for the forests rather than for the tyger itself:
"The forests of the night are Entuthon-Benython, the forests of
illusion, the depths of the caverned mind in which energy appears
demonic . . . Urizen frightens us to his altars by showing us
monsters."
As the above citations demonstrate, the criticism of the 1950s
framed this question of identification so that it would be
sustained well until the next three decades. But more importantly,
this urge to name the tyger's maker points to a decisive change in
"Tyger" literature. The joint significance the works of Erdman, Raine and Gardner share is in beginning a critical
attitude, anticipated perhaps by Schorer,
that seeks to form some lasting conclusions about the symbols and
concepts of the whole of Blake's poetry. But the successes of
these authors were less in their positive assertions than in their
methodology. They initiated and fostered in "Tyger" commentary an
abiding study of Blake's source material and of his intellectual
life. In addition, Blake's work began to be thought of not as a
disparate set of lyrics and mystical revelations, but as a broad
and systematic oeuvre which represented a complex and distinct
world-view. Later influential works by authors such as Hazard Adams, Morton D. Paley and
numerous others have clear models in these earlier efforts.
Finally, in 1956, Martin K. Nurmi's
article "Blake's Revisions of the `The Tyger'" focuses Erdman's
historical placement of "The Tyger" but more importantly represents
the first consideration of the poem's textual development as a part
of its meaning. Looking at different drafts of the poem alongside
contemporaneous news of France, Nurmi argues
that the poem matured with Blake's evolving sense of the moral
ambiguities of the French Revolution. The "unified symmetry" Blake
attains in his final draft, then, subsumes both the optimism of the
National Convention of 1793 and the bloody massacres the previous
September. In doing so, Blake "gives his symbol the comprehensive
scope of an `eternal principle'." (Tangentially, Nurmi cites H. M.
Margoliouth's brief biography of Blake
in establishing "The Tyger" as an occasional poem, though
Margoliouth provides slender evidence for such a claim.)
Nurmi, approaching the poem in 1975, is
more tentative: the poem, he says, "could be regarded as a
providential creation for-- not of or by-- the fallen
world of Experience," but only if the stars in the fifth stanza are
defeated stars of oppression. Nurmi answers the penultimate
question ("Did he who made the Lamb make thee?") with "a Yes of
such deep ambivalence . . . as to leave the questions without
definitive answers."
The speaker was imported from the New Criticism, which
scrupulously divided poet from persona, and critics found
in this difference a new, wealthy dimension of study. With this
third party came a variety of new questions: what is the
relationship between the speaker and the tyger? Between the
speaker and the tyger's creator? This line of criticism has
produced a speaker with a variety of spiritual, political and
philosophical temperaments whose condition, more often not, needs
careful diagnosis.
For Adams, the persona is less important
as a speaker than as a viewer, or more specifically, as a
visionary. Since it is the eye as much as the hand that
"dares frame . . . fearful symmetry", it is not only "the tiger
[who] is framed on the anvil of inspiration which is the eye of man
and God, but [the tiger] is also a symbol of the very same eye
which created it." It is therefore, in "the manner in which one
beholds the tiger [that] is all important to its and one's own
spiritual nature."
Grant identifies the speaker as the
"awestruck voice of Experience, that of an average but also
imaginative man, who is almost overwhelmed" by the mysteries of the
Tyger. In the end, however, the speaker knows "that the Tyger was
not created to improve his lot in the world, and he feels a holy
dread" and finally, "indignity" at such a fate (his position does
not change substantially after 29 years when writes again on the
poem for the Iowa Review, "This is not Blake's `The
Tyger'").
Grant's article also brought to the poem a new scrutiny to
some oversights in the criticism. For example, his assertion that
the "dare" in the earlier lines of the poem (as in "what dread hand
dare seize the fire?") are in the present subjunctive
tenses permits him "to bring these presumably past events into the
imagination's present focus as the questioner meditates on them."
Grant's suggestion, however, occasioned Fred
Robinson's response, in 1964, which argued frequent precedence
of the use of "dare" as a preterite. (Two years later, Grant and
Robinson collaborated on the same issue in "Tense and the Sense of
Blake's The Tyger.")
(Gardner, relies on a similar schism
between the narrative time of the poem and the remote cosmic origin
the speaker invokes. In 1986, in Retracing the Songs of
Innocence and of Experience, he regards the poem as a short
cosmic history "which takes the mind back through the poem and
beyond . . . in a search of `his' identity, `he' who has been there
all along, having created the tiger the poem invokes.")
Grant was also among the very first to
closely study each grammatical molecule of the poem as it relates
to the poem's overall meaning. His fastidious attention to syntax
leads him to argue in favor of eliding identity of the tyger and
its creator (as in, "what dread hand? & what dread feet?") and so,
forbid any clean break between the identities of the two. The
poem's "indeterminate syntax intimately relates [the two]. Any
sharp division would constitute a `cloven fiction,' like the
assertion that a good God can create evil." Leaving aside whether
or not an indeterminate God creates an even more vexing theological
question, it is sufficient to say that Grant's
makes a subtle reading.
Likewise, other critics hold that the questioner, suffering
from limited vision, does not, or cannot, understand the tyger.
Leopold Damrosch, Jr. (1980), concluding
that the tyger is a symbolic aspect of energy, says that "the
speaker is right to fear the fires of energy," which, even if
"creative", are obviously "purgative" and "tormenting" as well.
Robert E. Simmons, writing in Visionary
Forms Dramatic (1970), reads "The Tyger" "as an account of the
growth of an illusion of terror" by a speaker who is conditioned by
the symmetrical laws of Urizenic "fixity." John Beer brings in `the fourfold vision', Blake's
system of perfected consciousness, as an instrument of measuring
the speaker. The loss of fourfold vision, common in the Fallen
world, prevents the questioner from seeing that the "he who made
the Lamb" also made the Tyger. But, Beer explains, terror and
fascination are one in the speaker because "even while the twofold
imagination in us is recoiling from the threat of the tiger, the
lost fourfold in us is responding to the attraction of its energy
and brightness." (Further, "because the horror is controlled by the
harmonized energy of the poem," Beer observes memorably, "it
appeals strongly to children, who enjoy the experience of
controlled terror.")
In a lecture given in 1970, F. R. Leavis suggested that the poem's penultimate
question ("Did he who made the Lamb make thee?") might stand in
paradoxically as an epigram both books of Songs, for "the
question is formidably complex, it is presented by the inclusive
whole, which insists implicitly that there can be no pointing with
epigrammatic neatness to any solution." The question, Leavis
states "conveys no protest" against the divinity that created the
tyger, but rather, with "profound awe," "it constates"--
registers, simply acknowledges-- the fact of the divine. But, he
continues less clearly, this fact "is a value, and the problem
constituted by the fact that there are other values gets its
recognition in the poem itself."
Robert Graves's 1969 remarks ("Tyger,
Tyger") are singular at least because of their categorical
decisiveness. Graves makes a wide and largely original survey of
issues within "The Tyger", discussing the poem's meter, its
editing, and even (heretically) its "faulty craftsmanship." His
conclusion, strangely, is not about the poem, but about how the
poem demonstrates that "Blake was certainly in . . . a state of
schizophrenia at the time" of its composition. It is a claim he
further supports by citing its presence of tigers in the work of
other tormented artists.
Paul Miner, writing in 1962, is the first
to write within a small set of readings in which "The Tyger" is
posed as a philosophical hoax on the speaker, or as a moment of
false sublimity. Miner sees in the poem as a deliberate and cosmic
evasion: "What begins as a poem of pure ontology ends in
metaphysical casuistry." Coleman O. Parsons
(1968), feels that the "speaker has glimpses of reality," but
receives "no vision" for his efforts. The final effect, says
Parsons, is that "there is a feeling of enlargement, but no
message, [and] no affirmation."
A less explicitly spiritual version of the poem's false
sublimity exists in Harold Pagliaro's
recent study (1987) of the poem charting a similar movement in the
speaker. For Pagliaro, the awe for the tiger dissipates in the
asking of his questions, so that by the sixth stanza, he is beyond
"the chief intensity of his vision of the fearful creature." The
result is not much more than aerobic; the speaker arrives not at
the spirituality of "poised enlightenment" but rather at a
physically "heartened fatigue."
Another articulate case made for the poem's false (or failed)
sublimity is in Harold Bloom's Blake's
Apocalypse (1964). Bloom identifies the speaker as the
Songs' own Bard of Experience, and characterizes him as a
man who is typically liable to become "prostrate before a mystery
entirely of his own creation." This cowardice of the divine
reaches its height when, terrified of receiving a response to the
question "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?", he "abandons the
issue and plunges back into the affrighted awe of the sixth
stanza."
In his 1964 article "A Rhetorical Question Answered," for
example, Philip Hobsbaum misanthropically states, "It is quite
evident that the critics"-- all critics, he attempts to show --
"are not trying to understand the poem at all." The problem with
them, he says, is that the poem's commentators demand answers to
questions in a poem which are entirely rhetorical. Any answers to
the question such as the one posed by Kathleen Raine, "Who Made the Tyger?," Hobsbaum says, "is
going outside relevant enquiry." And in demanding such answers,
what critics "seem to be looking for could be another poem, a
mystical treatise, a philosophical dissertation" but "it cannot be
a critique."
In a much lower key, Kay Parkhurst
Long claims that "The Tyger" is a broad parody of "a major
compulsion of mankind-- the tendency to generalize, to label, to
categorize." Long finds parallels between the eighteenth-century
rationalists Blake attacked and the Blake scholars who limit his
animal-poem by interpretation-- both mind-forged manacles of
"restrictive logic." And so, she concludes: "a tiger, or any
creature, exists as evidence of the unending potentials of the
universe and of man's imaginative perceptions of the universe."
Somewhat like Hobsbaum, Larry Swingle
"looks to [the poem] as a positive phenomenon," an event from which
the reader transforms and simultaneously, is transformed.
Interpretation is not possible, says Swingle, for "our relationship
with `The Tyger' [and its questions] consists of `We do not know'
on nearly every matter." Since "one cannot reason things through
and discover answers to "The Tyger"," he says, the reader must
accept the text is a kind of spindle of meaning: "Like Los, the
reader must say: "I will not Reason and Compare: my Business is to
Create."
For Stanley Fish, the poem's critical
legacy provides the opportunity to illustrate the possibly
limitless horizons of "acceptable readings." In his 1980 book,
Is There a Text in This Class?, he puts the contradictory
interpretations of Kathleen Raine, and E. D.
Hirsch, side by side. Both interpretations,
he maintains, are not just right-- in fact they are "obvious"--
but only if one accepts the premises with which either begins. The
equal "obviousness" of differing interpretations of "The Tyger"
help Fish enunciate what has become a familiar interpretive
problem: "it is assumptions, not the facts they make possible,
that are at stake in any critical dispute."
(Taking this a step farther, he builds an "absurd" reading in
which of the speaker of the poem regrets having eaten the tyger, a
religiously forbidden meat. The poem, then, is a description of
the food's course as it travels through his digestive system. Fish
adds, in a parody of the breathless conclusions of so many "Tyger"
articles: "The poem ends as it began, with the speaker paying the
price of his sin and wondering at the inscrutable purposes of a
deity who would lead his creatures into digestive temptation.")
Whole-heartedly optimistic views of "The Tyger" are rare,
which makes Dennis Welch's well-considered
remarks on "`The Tyger' and Comic Vision" even more
valuable. He finds the switch from the word "could" in the first
stanza to the word "dare" in the sixth to imply "an admiration of
such a power" that dazzles and fascinates the speaker. For Welch, the speaker sees in the tiger not a form
of twisted energy (after Gardner's, for
example), but rather "the limits of energy the Creator imposes on
the tyger". This, in turn, calls to mind "the self-limitation of
God-- to become fallen in order to redeem the fallen." There
should be assent to the question "Did he who made the Lamb make
thee?", "because his plan is a divine and human comedy," about
which "the speaker is on the verge of detecting."
It is the efficiency with which Raymond Lister dispatches the entire problem of the
tiger's creator that deserves mention: "Blake himself could have
supplied one answer to these questions if he had quoted his own
words from America and elsewhere. . . . `everything that
lives is holy'-- everything including the tyger." Therefore? "The
answer is decidedly in the affirmative." And so, we are practically
assured, the creator did in fact smile his work to see.
Critics favoring deconstructionist approaches to the lyric
have been more frequent, though their work has been for the most
part compact and incidental. Maybe because of this, their
conclusions have not been entirely uniform, even if all of them
bear the same theoretical turns of phrase.
For Graham Pechey, for example, "The
Tyger" futilely attempts to carry out "a misdirected search for a
transcendental signified," an "undivided divine subject" (i.e.,
God). Not finding one, the poem resolves not into a history of a
Deity with an "indefinite past," but instead (rather anti-
climactically) "a work of words that come together in that very
moment." For Pechey, who offered this brief reading in 1981 for
the collection 1789: Reading Writing Revolution, what
finally emerges, like the French revolution itself, is the "profane
historicity" of the signifier triumphing over the repressive
signified.
Steven Vine (1993) replies that Pechey's
reading "effectively eliminates the questions of the text." Vine
clings, however, to Pechey's sense of a lost God, but he asserts
that the transcendental signified "survives as a ghostly function,"
expressed as the silence meeting each of the speaker's questions.
It is Nobodaddy, Vine says, Blake's sometimes risible figure of
authority, who returns and "haunts" the poem (and others),
"inscribing silence in the speech of performance." Michael Ferber's questioner, like Vine's, cannot receive
answers from his tyger/auditor, and is left to wander "the forests
of aporia."
Steven Shaviro's 1982 article in
Boundary2, "Striving with Systems" is by far the most
fully realized deconstructionist reading (though Shaviro places
some distance between himself and Jacques Derrida). Shaviro
assumes that a poem (and a poet) "so explicitly concerned with
questions of origins" and contraries cannot hope to resolve its
inevitable aporias. The result is a "Tyger" that exists in a state
of impossible contraries that cancel one another as they strive to
exist without each other; the poem becomes a "scene [that] is not
a scene and not an origin, and can only be constituted as such, or
be apprehended at all, by recourse to an act of interpretation or
representation which it is advance disqualifies." Shaviro also
explains some of the poem's convenience to psychoanalytic
description; the poem becomes "the production or reproduction even
as it is at the same time to the contrary, the repression,
representation, and interpretation-- of that pre-originary anxiety
which precedes repression."
David Punter appears to agree with
Shaviro on this point. "The tiger belongs," he says, "to a world
before sublimation; he exists now as a haunting, flickering image
of a dangerous world of instinct." The animal, "the unacceptable
face of desire," is therefore a threat to those with "smooth
notions of a divine plan." But "the tiger will not be kept in
place," Punter says, "any more than we can refuse the manmade gifts
which the hammer and the anvil will inevitably offer." The
experienced world, therefore, must find a "path of manifesting
energy lies not away from or round but through the jungle of
developing human powers."
Susan Hawk Brisman and Leslie Brisman find in Lacanian psychoanalysis a
productive means of re-naming the assumed roles in the poem. "The
Tyger" and "The Lamb", they say, are ways of establishing a
relationship to a Symbolic Other of order and authority (God)
through an Imaginary Other (the animals addressed). While the
speaker of "The Lamb" finds it very easy to incarnate God in the
docile Lamb, "the incessant questions" of "The Tyger" fail "to call
forth the Symbolic Other" that the questioner searches for. But if
there is only silence from the tyger, there are "awesome thoughts
that . . . take the place" of a direct reply. Instead of an
emergence of a Symbolic Other, there is an elision of the two
concepts: "The fearful symmetry of the tiger evokes from the
speaker a response to this Imaginary counterpart that [he] desires
to have from a Symbolic Other."
In the 1980 article "Spears, Spheres and Spiritual Tears",
Nelson Hilton attempts to illuminate the
perennially mysterious lines 17-18 ("When the stars threw down
their spears/And water'd heaven with their tears."). First, Hilton
begins, readers must recognize the associative logic which binds
the words, rhymes and rhetorical imagery to one distinctly Blakean
cosmogony of artistic creation. Further, an ideal reader will
sense the "sub-vocalized paronomasia" of the poem, as in the word
"tyger" itself, which is "in part the creature of wrath and
anger and so associated with flames of fire; or
the word "symmetry," which doubles, among other puns, as the
exclamation "see me try." Words like "spears" and "spheres" of the
fifth stanza set in motion other, more complex Blakean associations
which spiral and enlarge the poem's meaning without any assurance
of a comfortable closure. For Hilton, "the force of and desire for
underlying, unending interconnections of language present in
polysemous sub-vocalization are everywhere at work" in the poem.
"The Tyger" then, is "a scene of writing" whose "real question" is
"how the deadly terrors of language-overload are to be (mentally)
grasped and (physically) clasped in words."
Stuart Peterfreund, writing in
1991, decides that the lyric is a direct, almost editorial,
critique of the rationalist natural science that Blake so
vehemently despised. Peterfreund's speaker is thoroughly
Newtonian, searching with his questions for the identity of some
Great Clockmaker of the Universe. Observing that the tyger is
metonymically framed by the speaker's questions (which invoke each
of its individual parts), Peterfreund finds that the tyger's
relation to its Maker is rhetorically created by the
speaker himself. "Tiger-as-effect," he says, "testifies to the
existence of an artifice-as-cause that is the ultimate object of
the speaker's knowledge." But the questioner is really only
successful, he says, in creating "the illusion that the speaker is
empowered to speak in place of the tiger's creator by insisting on
the tiger as reified, naturalized effect of that first cause."
"The Tyger" has been Blake's most popular poem since almost
its publication, a commonplace that everyone, from little children
to retiring faculty, knows without hesitation. What, then,
accounts for its sudden critical importance after the Second World
War? And what has sustained that output for almost five decades?
There is a respected interpretation of "The Tyger" that the
poem records the French Revolution as an historical energy.
Whether or not that moment should be one of wonder, beguilement or
horror is a matter of principled judgement. Most critics are
decided that the revolution, like the animal symbolizing it,
belongs to a power beyond the control of human agents.
In the same way, "The Tyger" came to speak for the dread
energy belonging to the atomic bomb. Held together at a distance,
critical responses to the poem after 1945 seem like a prismatic
account of the self in the Cold War. An omnipresent and masterless
energy lurks in the most familiar critiques of the poem. Jesse Bier's tyger contains both "the marvelous and the
fatal." Even Nelson Hilton's "unending
interconnections" of relatively innocent word play take on the
nervous aspect of uncontrolled fission. Indeed, it is in this
anxious context that Morton D. Paley (1954)
and Harold Bloom (1976) looked for the source
of sublime wrath in Job and Jakob Boehme. And it is the very
evidence of this animal ("burning bright") that led Kathleen Raine and Stanley Gardner
to find a creative (and potenially destructive) demiurge as its
parent.
It is possible to date the true beginning of "Tyger" studies
not simply from the emergence of the New Criticism, but from August
6, 1945. After that date, several millions in Europe, the United
States, the Soviet Union and elsewhere faced collective
annihilation as a casual possibility. And like the speaker of so
many interpretations, this self, living in its petty world of
experience, shrinks to an infinitesimal point when contemplating
such a broadly statistical death. The "apocalyptic limelight" that
critics like Northrop Frye saw the tyger
bounding in was lit from the rising tower of a mushroom cloud.
Further, "The Tyger" seemed to be encoded with the same binary
value systems that held the Cold War world in place: American
capitalism in the West and Soviet communism in the East; the first
world of the northern hemisphere and the third of the southern.
The mutual exclusiveness of such an ethical world is mirrored in
essays that seek to name the tyger as either Los's or Urizen's,
God's or the Devil's; good or evil. Though it may risk
trivializing forty-five years of scholarship, so much of this
criticism has seemed to be a piece of Cold War magic; by naming the
atomic beast, there existed a possibility of assimilating it, or
least, turning it into a household demon, a more familiar
nightmare.
With the passing of the Cold War (although not, as we often
comfortably assume, nuclear weaponry) the "golden age" of "Tyger"
criticism will also pass. Or at least one golden age, anyway. The
questions of "The Tyger" will persist as long as possibility of the
collective annihilation exists and, with it, the annihilation of
the concept of the individual as well.
--Bruce Borowsky
January 1996
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L. Greenberg, editors.
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Stevenson, Warren. "The Tyger as
Artefact," Blake Studies. Fall 1969, 2, 1:5-19.
Story, Alfred T. William Blake: His Life
Character and Genius. New York: Haskell House Publishers Ltd.,
1970. First published in 1893. See esp. 90-1.
Swinburne, Charles Algernon. William
Blake: A Critical Essay. London: Chatto & Windus, 1906. See
especially pp. 123-5.
Swingle, Larry. "Answer to Blake's Tyger: A
Matter of Reason or Choice?" Concerning Poetry. 1968,
2:61-71.
Symons, Arthur. William Blake.
Archibald Constable and Comapny, Ltd: London, 1907.
Thorpe, James. William Blake: The Power
of the Imagination. San Marino: The Huntington Library,
1979. See esp. 19-24. Small emblems of the tyger guard the
beginning and end of the book.
Vine, Steven. Blake's Poetry: Spectral
Visions. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993. 39-40; 50-1.
Wagenknect, David. Blake's Night:
William Blake and the Idea of Pastoral. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1973. See esp. 84-99. Cited in Damrosch.
Weathers, Winston, editor. William
Blake: The Tyger. Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill
Publishing Company, 1969. Contains eleven articles, all concerning
"The Tyger."
Welch, Dennis. "Blake's `Tyger' and Comic
Vision," CEA Critic. Fall 1990. vol. 53, 1:29-39.
Welsh, Andrew. The Roots of Lyric:
Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1978. See especially 4-11.
Wicksteed, Jospeh H. Blake's Innocence
and Experience: A Study of the Songs and Manuscripts. New
York: E. P. Dutton, 1928. See especially 191-200; and 246-251.
Williams, Harry. "The Tyger and the Lamb,"
in Concerning Poetry. 1972, 5:49-56.
Wilkinson, D. R. M. "Blake's `Songs':
Taking Stock," English Studies. Netherlands. June 1985,
66, 3:227-240. Contains summary of Zachary Leader's reading of
"The Tyger".
Zelazny, Roger. "The Burning" [a poem] in
Sparks of Fire edited by James Bogan and Fred Gross.
Richmond, California: North Atlantic Books, 1982. pp. 25-26.
with ten thousand shields and
spears.
In a different vein, William Doxey
demonstrates that rhetorical precedence exists for interpreting
line two's "forests of the night" as a figure of speech meaning
simply the night sky and its constellations. (Along the same
lines, he maintains that the line's significance, if not the whole
poem's, lies in just such astronomical sources).Tigers as Blake may have known them in his time
The main topics and problems of the poem
Some emergent concerns of the 1940s and 1950s
The 1960s: meet the speakers
In Spring 1960, Texas Studies in Language and
Literature presented two pivotal "Tyger" articles which
introduce "the speaker" as a new character into "the forests of the
night". Both John E. Grant in his "The Art
and Argument of the Tyger" and Hazard Adams
in "Reading Blake's Lyrics: `The Tyger'". The two critics
radically altered the reception of the poem by insisting on the
tyger as a created image, rather than a created
thing. As Grant states, "the focus
of interest in the poem itself is on the Tyger as percept,
rather than object, and on the speaker as
subject."
A singular opinion: Robert Graves's reaction to the
poem
Paper Tygers: the poem as an instance of the false sublime
(and still other disappointments)
Against Interpretation
Martin Nurmi observes that the "lyric in
its powerful ambiguity approaches absolute art in poetry and
stubbornly resists critical attempts to explain its meaning." The
statement is in large part rhetorical, another laurel meant for the
tyger's resilient, uninterpretable brow. Some critics, however,
have taken that sentiment, or something close to it, at its
word.Smiling Tygers: optimistic views of the poem
Recent interpretations of the poem
Contemporary literary theory has not overwhelmed "The Tyger"
with its customary interpretive zeal. Nevertheless, these new
instruments have given the lyric new life and new contexts.A concluding observation about "Tyger" criticism and the Cold
War
"The Tyger": a bibliography