So Tender and so Cruel

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”.