The Tyger

The poem at a glance

Published in Songs of Experience (1794), The Tyger is the dark twin of Blake’s The Lamb, from Songs of Innocence. Where the earlier poem answers its own question (who made thee?) with a gentle God, this one only asks. The speaker imagines the Tyger’s maker as a blacksmith working at furnace and anvil, wonders whether he smiled at his work, and finally asks the unaskable: ‘Did he who made the Lamb make thee?’ If one creator made both gentleness and terror, then creation contains both, and so, Blake hints, do we: the ‘forests of the night’ are inside us as much as around us.

Methods that matter

Form: hammer-blow quatrains and one changed word

Six couplet-rhymed quatrains in a pounding, trochaic beat: the rhythm of a hammer on an anvil, so the sound of the poem enacts the forging it describes. The final stanza repeats the first almost exactly, a circular frame with a single alteration: ‘Could frame’ becomes ‘Dare frame’. The question shifts from ability to audacity, and that one word carries the poem’s whole movement from wonder towards something closer to accusation.

Relentless rhetorical questioning

Almost every sentence is a question, driven by the anaphora of ‘What… What… What’. None is answered. The effect is a speaker overwhelmed, circling something too big for statements, and a reader forced to attempt the answers themselves. The questions also allude outwards: ‘On what wings dare he aspire?’ recalls Icarus, another figure who dared too much and burned.

The blacksmith conceit and fire imagery

Hammer, chain, furnace, anvil: the extended metaphor makes creation industrial, muscular and dangerous, a God of labour rather than a God of words. Fire runs through the poem, from ‘burning bright’ to the ‘fire’ of the Tyger’s eyes, as beauty and threat in a single element. Even the heavens react: when ‘the stars threw down their spears’, creation itself seems to weep or surrender at what has been made.

Key quotations

Quotation	Method	Why it matters
‘Tyger Tyger, burning bright’ (l. 1)	Repetition, trochaic rhythm	An incantation, not a description: the doubled name summons the creature like a spell.
‘Could frame thy fearful symmetry?’	Oxymoronic pairing	Beauty (‘symmetry’) and terror (‘fearful’) fused: the poem’s whole paradox in two words.
‘What the hammer? what the chain, / In what furnace was thy brain?’	Blacksmith conceit, anaphora	Creation as industry: a maker of strength and heat, not gentleness, forging even the mind.
‘Did he who made the Lamb make thee?’	Allusion, contrast	The central question: can one God be responsible for both innocence and terror?
‘Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?’ (l. 24)	Circular frame, verb shift	‘Could’ becomes ‘Dare’: by the end the question is about courage and audacity, not power.