"The Tyger” By William Blake
"The Tyger" offers a great deal of metaphors and images that come to mind. However, there is one metaphor, whose theme is the outline of the entire poem: Evil. Mr. Blake compares the tiger, to evil. The entire poem, and all it's metaphors circle around the Comparison between evil and the tiger. The chorus serves as an introduction to the main message with it.
"Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright,( 4 syllables)
In the forests of the night, (5 syllables)
What immortal hand or eye ( 6 syllables)
Could frame thy fearful symmetry" (8 syllables)
When reading the first stanza for the first time, one does not automaticly understand the meaning of the stanza, nor the meaning of the poem. However, after reading the rest of the poem, the meaning becomes clear. The “forests of the night”, the dark hopeless lands, covered with twisted gray trees, teaming with evil creatures, that exist only at night, this is the home of the tiger, in its deepest and darkest areas, burning bright. Notice the contrast here, the tiger, or evil, is burning bright in the forests of the night, which are dark and evil. This can be interpreted in two ways, one that the tiger is a beacon of light in the forests, the second that the tiger is the very centre of the forest, standing out even among these fiends, the centre. The first possibility can quickly be dismissed upon reading the rest of the poem. Therefore, even intuitively, the image that comes to mind, is that of the devil, or the arch-demon- Satan himself. :
"What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"
In these to lines, the poem centers on what will become one of the main messages of the poem. The question, of why. Immortal is divine, divine is God. There is a question directed at God, how could he create the "fearful" symmetry of evil. Moreover, the choice of words, hand or eye, not only demands an explanation from God, but questions him, what God could have possibly thought (eye) of the...