The Tiger: Notes

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Blake's most famous poem raises profound questions, but does not finally answer them. How could the creator make something as terrifying and awesome as the Tiger? Could the same creator also be responsible for making the Lamb (both Christ, and the creator whose meek and mild spirit dominates the Songs of Innocence)? Is the Tiger not created in God's own image? Is the Tiger a symbol of Evil, for elsewhere (as in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) Blake praises energy as a form of good and delight. These speculations lead to wider questions, about the wisdom of a God who can create such terrifyingly destructive creations, and questions of God's creation of Good and Evil, or Good-and-Evil. Comparison with The Lamb in the Songs of Innocence is extremely illuminating here. The Tiger is personified as having been born from fire (stolen from the Gods by Prometheus?), forged rather than created, and characterised also in terms of its (metallic) coldness: note the effectiveness of the poem's imagery in creating associations of fire, coldness and darkness. Interpretation of the poem is complicated by the fact that we cannot assume the speaker of the poem to be Blake himself, but perhaps any poet, who has created this Tiger out of his own imagination ("forests of the night").

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