William Blake The Tyger Analysis

William Blake, after having written Songs of Innocence (1789) which represents the innocence and the pastoral world from the perspective of the early life (childhood), acquires a more lugubrious tone in his work named Songs of Experience (1794), where the poet expresses his discontent, and states how dreary the life of a person becomes when they reach the adulthood, and comments on the two contrary states of the human soul. Blake thought that adults were corrupted, that they had lost the goodness and purity at the very moment when they gained experience from their lives, thus the collection of poems talking about the trouble within adulthood is an obvious attempt to narrate the assumptions of human thought and social behaviour through poems

The main argument of the poem is rather muddled because it has vivid and impressive imagery, and at the same time several metaphors that must be analysed; first of all and taking a look from the surface, the poem is about a tiger, that is to say, “a large, powerful, brownish-orange coloured cat with black stripes” that is asked several questions by the speaker, such as who, how and why were you made, Tyger? What was the person or thing like that made you? As it is known, William Blake mastered symbolism, thus readers cannot just focus on the ‘simplest’

(...) On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire?” All these questions without answers provide a mysterious and lugubrious tone, even though the readers usually understand that these questions are asked by God. The poem consists of six quatrains (a stanza with four lines) of rhyming couplets (AABB) with an almost trochaic rhythm in the whole poem, that is to say, an accented syllable followed by an unaccented one (“TYger TYger, BURning