William Blake’s romantic style poem “The Tiger” also know as “The Tyger” is one of many poems belonging to his collection of “Songs of Experience”. This poem is made up of six quatrains with seven syllables: stressed and unstressed and rhyming couplets. Through the use of the poetic devices meter, rhyme and alliteration, Blake creates an almost forceful rhythm to the poem which makes it sound like a song or a nursery rhyme. However, hidden in this playful chant, Blake uses allusions, symbols, imagery and metaphors to propose a deep, philosophical question about creation.
In the first stanza and first two lines of the poem, “Tiger, tiger, burning bright / In the forests of the night. “, Blake uses metaphor to compare a tiger to something burning bright in the forest. He then asks in the third and fourth lines, “What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”. Here uses symbolism and asks who made this tiger or whatever deeper thing it might represent. With who’s immortal hands, was this fearful beast created by? One could interpret that Blake is referring to god or some other divine being because the tiger is described as “fearful symmetry”.
In the lines of the second stanza of the poem, “In what distant deeps or skies / Burnt the fire of thine eyes? / On what wings dare he aspire? / What hand dare seize the fire?”, Blake uses allusion to mention the creator of this creature. Was the tiger created in the skies or in the deep and from which wings did it’s creator aspire? Perhaps another way to phrase it is, was the tiger created in heaven or in hell and did it’s creator have wings like that of an angel or perhaps of a dragon(which represents the devil).
In the lines of the third stanza of the poem, “And what shoulder and what art / Could twist the sinews of thy heart? / And when thy heart began to beat, / What dread hand and what dread feet?”, Blake uses imagery to depict the creation of the tiger. The “shoulder” being those of the creator...