So Tender and so Cruel

There’s an uncomfortable edge to all my tattoos—a tiger, an eagle, a shark, a dream-wolf and a cross from an eighth century Celtic warrior’s tomb. There is a theme, however, and it’s summed up in one of the most anthologized poems in the English language, from William Blake’s Songs of Experience: The Tyger.

Blake (1757-1827) was a printer and engraver by profession. As an artist, poet and visionary, he was mocked and disregarded during his lifetime, but since the first posthumous edition of his work in 1863, (almost forty years after his death), his popularity and reputation have only grown. The Tyger is one of the most anthologized poems in the English language. 

Here it is, with Blake’s original spelling.

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 eye?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand dare sieze 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?

Tiger, Tyger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand & eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

There’s a lot going on in this poem, beneath its rather conventional, hymn-like stanza form and rhyme; and the more time you spend with it, the deeper it becomes. It’s a bit too linear for my own taste, yet its mysterious power depends on that linearity: the series of questions, all unanswered, with the underlying image of the manufacturing forge. The unanswered questions drive home the single fact that God made this terrifying thing, this beautiful killing machine of flesh and blood, the tiger who inhabits the unknown “forests of the night”.

Relentlessly, Blake asks all the necessary questions, and it takes poetic courage—prophetic courage—to leave them unanswered the way he does, forcing us to face the fact that there is no answer, no human answer at any rate. He uses the conventional stanza and chromatic form of a hymn. It’s one of the many ironies of his life that he, so profoundly a dissenter, so contemptuous of authority, especially religious authority, adopted that poetic form. It seems especially wonderful to me that, long after his unrecognized death, he has entered the religious canon with another of his famous poems, Jerusalem.

At the turning point of the poem, he breaks his catalogue of questions with a shift in imagery and point of view that seems to come out of nowhere: “When the stars threw down their spears and watered heaven with their tears…” That surprising shift in focus, with its reference to some unexplained and undescribed prehistoric event, launches the ultimate, haunting question—still unanswered: “did he who made the lamb,”—the symbol of innocence, with enormous Christian implications—“make thee?” 

And then, after that surprising shift, the poem returns to its opening and repeats the first stanza, changing only one word: 

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? (Italics mine)

Interestingly, in the first draft of this poem, Blake uses the word “dare” in both the opening and the closing stanzas. But in the published version, it only appears here, in the climactic line—the culmination of the existential horror of this creation. 

God “dared” to fashion both the thing of darkness, the tiger, and the lamb—its natural prey. The angels threw down their spears and wept. And perhaps God smiled “his work to see.” We don’t know for sure; the poet merely poses the question. But by posing the question, Blake is suggesting that in fact, the creator smiled.

I’ve never been a student of Blake, although the stubborn freedom of his life, the strange and haunting beauty of his illustrations, and, of course, the tyger have always been an inspiration. He himself considered his prophetic poems more important than the songs. Those, I find unreadable; they go on and on, filling turgid pages and giving learned commentators something to do. In reality, who needs more than The Tyger?

I’ll be putting a quote from it on my arm in a month or two—not the whole poem, of course, and probably not even that entire final stanza. Perhaps the final line; perhaps only the wonderful phrase, “fearful symmetry”, which, long before Darwin or Einstein, describes the uncomfortable, restless, unanswerable riddle of creation, the theme of all the psalms: how a loving God could be at once so tender and so cruel.