Blake's Tyger and Lamb

Blake's illustrated version of the poem

William Blake's poem "The Tyger" is his most-read poem. It consists entirely of questions about the nature of God and creation. It asks how the same God that created vulnerable beings like the lamb could also have made the fearsome tiger. 

The tiger becomes a symbol for one of religion's most difficult questions: Why does God allow evil to exist?

I first read the poem in a high school class and my initial question was "Why did he spell tiger wrong?" Not the deepest of literary issues. In writing this essay, I did some digging for an answer since my teacher had no answers other than "It's what they did back then."

 William Blake intentionally spelled "tiger" as "tyger" in his poem that was in his collection titled "Songs of Experience" (1794). It is thought that changing the traditional spelling of "tiger" to "tyger" not only gave the word a unique. mythical and archaic quality. It also allowed Blake to exercise creative freedom about the creature he was describing. The tyger is a literal creature but also a symbolic force.

Blake was also known for his interest in the relationship between sound and meaning in language and tyger captures the phonetic qualities of the word.

"...What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
...Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" 

The lamb refers to Blake's poem, "The Lamb," where God is associated with a gentle and innocent lamb. 

THE TYGER

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat.
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,|
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp.
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Compare that tiger to the lamb. Blake was clearly a religious person who saw visions of angels, but to me "The Tyger" is a poem that literally questions God. Can God be credited with both the good and evil in the world? I din't think you could give him the credit for creating the "lambs" of this world without also giving him responsibility for the "tygers" of this world.  That was my high school interpretation (which my teacher did not appreciate or agree with) and it remains my interpretation.

THE LAMB

Little Lamb who made thee 
         Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice! 

         Little Lamb who made thee 
         Dost thou know who made thee 
         Little Lamb I'll tell thee,
         Little Lamb I'll tell thee!

He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.

         Little Lamb God bless thee. 
         Little Lamb God bless thee.

---

---

Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

The Visions of William Blake

Blake's illustration of angels guarding Jesus in the sepulchre 

November 28 is the birthday of poet and artist William Blake, born in London in 1757. He was four years old when he had a vision that God was at his window. A few years later, he went for a walk and saw a tree filled with angels, their wings shining. He had other visions, too: he saw the prophet Ezekiel sitting under a tree, and angels walking with farmers making hay.

While some aspects of his behavior and beliefs might be considered eccentric or even insane by conventional standards, it's better to approach the question of his mental state with some sensitivity and historical context.

During Blake's time (1757-1827), the understanding and classification of mental health were different from contemporary perspectives. There is no definitive evidence to suggest that Blake was clinically insane. However, he did experience visions and claimed to have mystical experiences, which heavily influenced his artistic and poetic creations. Blake's unique worldview and his incorporation of spiritual and visionary elements in his works are more often seen as products of his unconventional thinking and artistic genius rather than indicators of mental illness.

When Blake was 10 his parents sent him to drawing school, and at the age of 14, he was apprenticed to an engraver. After seven years, he went into business for himself, and a few years later he privately printed his first book, Poetical Sketches (1783 which was a total flop. The book wasn't even mentioned in the index of London's Monthly Review, a list of every book published that month.

Not long after that, Blake's beloved brother, Robert, died at the age of 24. Blake spent two sleepless weeks at his deathbed, and when he died, Blake claimed that he saw his brother's spirit rise through the ceiling, clapping its hands with joy. From then on, Blake had regular conversations with his dead brother. 

A year later, Robert appeared to William in a vision and taught him a method called "illuminated printing," which combined text and painting into one. Now known as relief etching, it was a huge breakthrough in printing. Blake printed his own Songs of Innocence (1789), Songs of Experience (1794), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), and The Book of Los (1795). 

Blake died at the age of 69. He spent the day of his death working on a series of engravings of Dante's Divine Comedy. That evening, he drew a portrait of his wife, and then told her it was his time. A friend of Blake's who was there at his deathbed wrote: "He died on Sunday night at 6 o'clock in a most glorious manner. [...] Just before he died, His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten'd and He burst out into Singing of the things he saw in Heaven."

At the time of his death, Blake was an obscure figure, best remembered for his engravings of other peoples' work, or maybe his one famous poem, "The Tyger." Among those who knew more about his life's work, the consensus was that Blake was insane. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, which he had engraved and painted by hand, had sold fewer than 20 copies in 30 years. 

It wasn't until more than 30 years after his death that a husband-and-wife team, Alexander and Anne Gilchrist, published a two-volume biography of Blake that firmly established him as a brilliant and important artist.

Throughout his career, he continued to see visions — in addition to communing with the spirits of relatives and friends, he claimed to be visited by the spirits of many great historical figures, including Alexander the Great, Voltaire, Socrates, Milton, and Mohammed. He talked with them and drew their portraits. He was also visited by angels and once by the ghost of a flea, whose portrait he drew. 

Blake wrote:

"I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation [...] 'What,' it will be Question'd, 'When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?' O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host."

"First the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged: this I shall do by printing in the infernal method by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away and displaying the infinite which was hid."

 "Without minute neatness of execution, the sublime cannot exist! Grandeur of ideas is founded on the precision of ideas."

---

---

Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Blake's Unanswered Questions

art print of Blake's The Number of The Beast is 666

Last month, while thinking about a new prompt, I considered using "The Tyger" as a model poem. It might be the most famous poem written by William Blake, though "The Lamb" and "Jerusalem" are also contenders. The opening line, "Tyger Tyger, burning bright" is among the most famous opening lines in English poetry.

It turns out that I have already used "The Tyger" as a prompt about questions since the poem is a series of questions, as is "The Lamb."

Little Lamb who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

The poem appeared in Blake’s 1794 volume Songs of Experience, which complemented his earlier collection, Songs of Innocence. I was taught that the poem was a kind of answer to the earlier "The Lamb." 

"The Tyger" is a series of questions as the speaker wonders about a creator who would make something so fearsome. The tiger is "burning bright" and its creator is a kind of blacksmith.

In the fifth stanza, Blake brings in the "stars" which I have always associated with both astrology and destiny.

Blake seems to ask why this all-loving God made such a fearsome animal? "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?"

"The Tyger" is in Blake’s Songs of Experience, and is seen as a complement to the earlier Songs of Innocence with its innocent "The Lamb." Was Blake reconsidering the innocence of the world?

Scan of a plate printed by William Blake from Songs of Experience (1794)
British Museum, Public Domain via Wikimedia

     

---

Visit our website at poetsonline.org

---

Listening

Not everyone has the opportunity to attend poetry readings in their local area, but thankfully there are many available online. One source I was browsing and listening to today is the PoetryFoundation.org which has almost 3000 audio files.

I was just browsing and clicking and listening - the audio equivalent of doing that through an anthology.

I will admit to clicking on poems just because a title caught my attention - like 

"On Wanting to Tell [ ] about a Girl Eating Fish Eyes" by Mary Szybist, which begins:

 

—how her loose curls float 

above each silver fish as she leans in 

to pluck its eyes— 

or listening to "How to Love Bats" by Judith Beveridge:

open your mouth, out will fly names

like Pipistrelle, Desmodus, Tadarida. Then,

listen for a frequency

lower than the seep of water, higher

than an ice planet hibernating

beyond a glacier of Time.

As with browsing a poetry anthology or journal or an open reading, you will encounter poets you have never read before, which is always a good thing. 

I also subscribe/listen to the Poetry Foundation's podcast in which the editors talk to poets published in Poetry magazine and critics to discuss in more detail the issue. Conversations about poems are also something you might get at a reading. For example, I listened to a discussion about Terrance Hayes’s poem “How to Draw a Perfect Circle” and then promptly sat down to write a how-to poem of my own.

Some people say clicking these links leads you into a rabbit hole of more and more clicks. That is sometimes true for me. After listening to the Haye's podcast, I did click deeper into the prose selections on the site and read an essay "Another Life - Terrance Hayes and the poetics of the un-thought" by Joshua Bennett Hayes’s latest collection, American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin. It is a collection from the 200 days between President Trump’s election and the early summer of 2017. He wrote 70 sonnets which come from that time but are more about what led up to Trump's election.

After that though, I needed to return to some poetry to cleanse my poetry palate - perhaps William Blake's "The Ecchoing Green."  After too much reality, Blake sounds so happy that we might view him as naive. That would be a mistake.

...laugh away care,

Sitting under the oak,

Among the old folk, 

They laugh at our play, 

And soon they all say.

‘Such, such were the joys. 

When we all girls & boys, 

In our youth-time were seen, 

On the Ecchoing Green...’

Of Normal, Remarkable and Sunflowers

Blake print, from Jerusalem -
winged muse atop a floating sunflower,
1804-1820.

I was at a workshop with Mark Doty recently and he was having the group compare William Blake's poem "Ah, Sun-Flower" and a contemporary answer to it by Alan Shapiro.

Blake writes a poem to a sunflower that longs for a life beyond this earthly one.  Shapiro's writes a poem  for a sunflower that is not "weary of time" at all, but is defiantly living in the now.

I like that idea of answering an earlier poem and of the opposing view.


William Blake's "Ah! Sunflower"

Ah! sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun,
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller’s journey is done;

Where the youth pined away with desire,
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,
Arise from their graves and aspire;
Where my sunflower wishes to go.

We might also have looked at "Sunflower Sutra" by Allen Ginsberg -

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hung-over like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust—
—I rushed up enchanted—it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake...

or at sunflower poems by Frank Steele or by André Breton or others. Sunflowers are popular with poets, at least partially because of Blake's famous precedent.

Laura Shovan   Photo: J.Lewis

I was reading Laura Shovan's poem "Tomorrow Is Going To Be Normal" (from Mountain, Log, Salt, and Stone) and thought about how that poem has both that redefining and opposition at its center.

The boy in that poem finds relief in the day being "normal" and predictable, while the mother says she waits for the "remarkable to land on my shoulder or call me on the phone."  Two different philosophies. And the remarkable moment for the mother in that poem is that she and her son could be so different.

For this month's prompt, start with the meaning of a word. It might be a thing (sunflower) or idea (normal). In the poem, present two opposing ways of defining or describing the thing. You might have two voices, as Shovan does, or have the conflict be internal with one voice.

Submission deadline: June 5

 


Laura Shovan grew up in New Jersey. She is an honors graduate of the Dramatic Writing Program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. During her first career as a high school English teacher, Shovan was active in the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation’s Poetry Program and coordinated poetry readings by teen poets at several Dodge Poetry Festivals.

Since 2002, Shovan has been an Artist-in-Education for the Maryland State Arts Council, leading poetry workshops for school children.
Shovan's collection, Mountain, Log, Salt, and Stone, is the inaugural winner of the Clarinda Harriss Poetry Prize.

"For me, this collection tells a story about the transition from childhood to parenthood," said Shovan. "I hope the poems speak to those moments when something—a strange scrap of memory, an odd comment from a child—compels us to stop and pay complete attention to the sensory world."

Her personal website is at laurashovan.com her blog is Author Amok and her blog for poetry site for kids is at Mrs. Poems.

Prompt: Asking Questions with William Blake

Doubt by William Blake

When I was looking in my Norton Anthology for another poem, I came across William Blake's poem "The Tyger."Almost everyone who has sat through a few years of English literature classes in high school or college has come across this poem. Being that I do not have a good memory for poems, it surprised me that I could remember portions of this poem. I think that I was once assigned it for memorization.

When I reread it, I also remembered what I had liked about the poem when I first read it. It was filled with questions and, more importantly, the poet didn't seem to be able to answer them any more than I could answer them. You could write a poem that asked questions but didn't come up with the answers? This was something new to me.

Some teacher must have taken me through the poem and discussed how the questions are in themselves a kind of answer to the main question of "What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry." I doubt that God came up in my public school discussions, but then again it was a very different time - a time when having a Christmas tree in the classroom was considered the norm. In fact, would my teachers have suggested that some other method had produced the fearful symmetry?

For our September writing prompt at Poets Online, we are taking a shot at a poem that is almost all questions, but in the asking presents a kind of answer.

"William Blake (November 28, 1757 – August 12, 1827) was an English poet, visionary, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, Blake's work is today considered seminal and significant in the history of both poetry and the visual arts. While his visual art and written poetry are usually considered separately, Blake often employed them in concert to create a product that at once defied and superseded convention. Though he believed himself able to converse aloud with Old Testament prophets, and despite his work in illustrating the Book of Job, Blake's affection for the Bible was accompanied by hostility for the established Church, his beliefs modified by a fascination with Mysticism and the unfolding of the Romantic Movement around him."  excerpted from the Wikipedia entry on Blake

If you're interested in more about Blake's poems or artwork, try the Blake Archive.