So, is the tiger a fearful creature or an embodiment of grace and power? To find this out I am going to analyze one of William Blake’s most famous songs “The Tyger”. Anyone who had on occasion to read this very song faces an unusual mixture of the dreadful beast and the lackadaisical cat freely loitering around. How could this happen? Did the author deliberately create such a disputable beast? Disagreement in the sphere of aesthetics is spread through Blake’s brilliant creation; we can see it clearly in the most excellent song of the author “The Tyger”. This song is believed to be an autobiography in which the author struggles with the traditional meanings in a mixed medium (Lundeen 40-41). “Besides these lyric compositions, Mr. Blake has given several specimens of blank verse. Here, as might be expected, his personifications are bold, his thoughts original, and his style of writing altogether epic in its structure” (Bentley 155). A design underlines the poem, and attaches a sudden twist, with help of this lyrical device the poem is enriched (Leader 49).
The beast can not appear in such a lovely image. It seems that the author is captivated by the beauty, grace, power, strength, and might of this creature. I wonder whether a wild animal can be so delicately shaped. The author describes the tiger’s heart and brain, its eyes burning with fire. Blake seems to admire the power of the animal. May it be that he envies it? It is unclear for what purpose the author gives us the description of the fierce beast not in the form of censure, but the form of the ode.
Another version of the essence of the tiger is that every human has a right to live as he wants, to look like he wants to seem to other people the one that he wants. So, maybe the author tries to convince the reader that the tiger is not a fierce beast as we got accustomed to thinking, but a graceful creature full of kindness and sympathy. In our life, we meet different people, cruel and kind, beautiful and ugly, strong and weak. Thus, everyone can seem one person and to be another one. To disguise is human.
And finally, I would like to state that this whole image of the tiger could be the embodiment of William Blake. And not without reason he admires the strength and graceful figure of the enormous cat. Maybe this admiration is nothing but self-admiration; he intentionally creates the image of a strong beast, as he put his image into the image of the animal. This fact may serve as an identification of selfishness and narcissism, as the author shows only positive features of the main character of the poem; he does not mention the negative ones: the dreadful power, which may be a weapon against people, the bloodthirstiness of the fierce beast.
To conclude I would like to say that the poem is extremely interesting and thought-provoking. It made me think over the true essence of the image of the tiger in the poem. I have different opinions on this issue, so it seems to me that every opinion has a right to exist. The image of the tiger has many sides. The animal appears to the reader a huge motionless figure and seems to be unable to make somebody afraid of it. The image disperses the sensation of fear produced in the poem. “The pale shades of the sky and tree create an impression of lightness, even airiness, at odds with ‘the forests of the night” (Blake 188). While writing the song “The Tyger” the author used the technique of blank verses. It resembles perfectly the theme and the situation of the poem. The image seems to be static and thick-set, it does nothing during the poem, and Blake just reveals his ideas of the power and beauty of the wild creature. The image can be either realistic, positive, and prepossessing, or artificial, negative, and repulsive. In this very poem, the image is discrepant, it seems to possess all good and bad of the world.
Works Cited
Bentley, Gerald Eades, and G. Bentley Jr. William Blake: the critical heritage. Critical Heritage Series. The Collected Critical Heritage : The Romantics. The Romantics. Routledge, 1996.
Blake, William, and Andrew Lincoln. Songs of innocence and of experience, Blake’s illuminated books. The illuminated books. Princeton University Press, 1994.
Leader, Zachary, and William Blake. Reading Blake’s Songs. Routledge, 1981.
Lundeen, Kathleen. Knight of the living dead: William Blake and the problem of ontology. Susquehanna University Press, 2000.