Rethink.

The Tyger
William Blake

Tyger Tyger, burn­ing bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immor­tal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fear­ful symmetry?

In what dis­tant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoul­der, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the ham­mer? what the chain,
In what fur­nace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly ter­rors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burn­ing bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immor­tal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fear­ful symmetry?

Com­ment:

The ques­tion raised is that of immor­tal­ity, and what it means. For the ancients (think Achilles) immor­tal­ity is the grasp­ing of honor that will last beyond the age. The pagan gods are immor­tal, but they rely on honor too: Posei­don in the Iliad wor­ries about a wall Agamem­non and his allies make — instead of mak­ing sac­ri­fices, the Greeks build a wall that Posei­don feels out­does the works of the gods (Iliad Bk. 7, towards the end).

Now I have tied immor­tal­ity to char­ac­ter and divin­ity, and I think one can glance at The Lamb and see the imme­di­ate con­trast. “He calls him­self a Lamb” is an obvi­ous Chris­t­ian con­trast with these other gods, which do show up in the Tyger. The ques­tion is the mak­ing of the lamb, and except for “gave thee life,” it could be a per­son being described, a per­son taken care of as in the 23rd Psalm. What God gives does not seem to embolden, but rather makes us child­like, and maybe even child­ish. The way the Lamb is writ­ten, it sounds like a joke: Jesus spoke in para­bles, not nurs­ery rhymes. For more on Blake’s reli­gious views, see here.

In the first stanza, note the lit­eral con­trol over fire one who is immor­tal has: the impli­ca­tion of the tyger being fire (“burn­ing bright in the for­est”) is that only some­thing that was beyond human could shape it. Take note of “of the night,” too — I won­der if the impli­ca­tion is if the cre­ator of the tyger can work in the dark, out­side of light.

The sec­ond stanza is key because it sug­gests that the fire the immor­tal wields is a part of that immor­tal him­self. What has hap­pened is that divin­ity has alien­ated itself to cre­ate; in Cre­ation, we can see an aspect of the Cre­ator. “On what wings dare he aspire” — this is Daedalus, I think: he can cre­ate, but the dar­ing will hurt another. Cre­ation in-and-of itself is a break­ing of bounds. “What the hand, dare seize the fire” — this is Prometheus, who gave fire to men so that all men could create.

What started as beyond human is now becom­ing very human, as the “immor­tal” of the first stanza who might have resided in “dis­tant deeps or skies” now seems to have a direct rela­tion to our abil­ity to cre­ate. Con­trast where God and man meet in “The Lamb” — this is the reverse of that order.

Now the third stanza, about the pure force (“shoul­der,” “art”) needed to “twist” a heart into exis­tence, and then deal with it beat­ing, reminds me of this pas­sage from Yeats:

I saw a star­ing vir­gin stand
Where holy Diony­sus died,
And tear the heart out of his side.
And lay the heart upon her hand
And bear that beat­ing heart away;
Of Mag­nus Annus at the spring,
As though God’s death were but a play.

- from Two Songs From a Play

Diony­sus, the most human of the gods, was rou­tinely torn limb from limb by his fol­low­ers, and then would res­ur­rect. The sac­ri­fice of Christ is only alluded to in “The Lamb,” not described in vis­ceral detail. Here, the mere cre­ation of fury is itself a vio­lence, but notice that it is not fury being born, but rather a “heart.” Why must love come from such a vio­lence, one we might even stand apart from when completed?

Fol­low­ing this, the “brain” seems to have been shaped by Hep­haes­tus, who also forged the abil­ity to acquire (“grasp…its deadly ter­rors”). We have noted before implic­itly that Blake under­stands the role of fear in acqui­si­tion, but I do not remem­ber him link­ing that to the very fact of the human mind. It is not pos­si­ble, though, to tell whether the cre­ator made the mind or heart first, as the pri­or­ity of will and rea­son is con­flated in motion: the order­ing of these stan­zas that con­cern “heart, “mind,” and “stars” involves a pri­mal motion (that the heart beats), turned into some­thing delib­er­ate (grasps with deadly ter­ror), and then finally the ques­tion is, for what end?

Hep­haes­tus was the man who built armor for Achilles and Aeneas, who as men of war should remind us of the descen­dants of Cain, who warred for honor and glory and were all wiped away by the Flood. If the Cre­ator was respon­si­ble for the cre­ation of what is in the tiger, has he presided over a work so imper­fect that he must destroy his own Creation?

That last thought, I think, explains the final “dare” best. The issue with Cre­ation isn’t merely that it could hurt oth­ers — to dare to cre­ate is the enter­prise where God and man are on the same level, for it is what cre­ation does that deter­mines whether one made a mis­take or not.

• Democracy’s Mys­ti­cism: Thoughts on “All Reli­gions are One,” by Blake
• On Blake’s “A Divine Image”
• On Blake’s “The Lit­tle Boy Lost” and “The Lit­tle Boy Found”
• Chris­tian­ity and Moder­nity: Reflec­tions on Blake’s “The Human Abstract”
• The Imag­i­nary Life: “The Lake Isle of Inn­is­free,” W.B. Yeats

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