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As a child Blake had no formal schooling. He was apprenticed at the age of fourteen by engraver James Basic. In 1779 he began studies at The Royal Academy of Arts, but it was as a journeyman engraver that he was to make his living. When Blake was engraving his own designs, the general public envied him because they were not as creative as he was. Most of Blakes support came from a small group of artists and friends. Throughout his life booksellers employed Blake to engrave illustrations for a wide variety of publications.
Blake printed much of his poetry himself by using engraving methods he created. His method was to produce the text and illustrations for his books on copper plates. His greatest work as an engraver was his series of twenty-one illustrations to the Book of Job that was commissioned by his friend John Linnell. During the twentieth century Blake was one of the greatest engravers since the Renaissance. During his lifetime, Blakes work received very little attention, and most of his poetry was never published. When his work was noticed the readers viewed Blake as weird, confused, or mad.
One of the purposes of Blakes art was to change the way people see and to open up new worlds to them one continued vision of what had once been ordinary and common, but would become imagination itself. To Kathleen Raine William Blake is the only English poet whose central theme is the confrontation of imagination. Blakes most famous statement about his art is I will create a system or be enslaved by another man s. Blake also provided illustrations for most of his poems.
William Blake first published the Songs of Innocence in 1789. In 1794, these songs and the Songs of Experience were issued together in one volume, with a title page promising a demonstration of the two Contrary States of the Human Soul. According to Blakes nineteenth-century biographer Alexander Gilchrist, the poet and his wife did everything in making the book (Songs of Innocence) - writing, designing, printing, engraving- everything except manufacturing the paper... Never before surely was a man so literally the author of his own book (Gilchrist). The state of Innocence is of genuine love and naive trust toward all humankind, accompanied by unquestioned belief in Christian doctrine. The state of Experience is the profound disillusionment with human nature and society.
In selected poems by William Blake, he explores two different sides of God as represented in the creation of a tiger, a lamb, and a fly. In The Tiger, William Blake explains that theres more that meets the eye when one examines the Creator and his creation, the tiger. In The Lamb, Blake explains that God can be like a child meek and innocent. In The Fly, Blake questions the nature of God with his creation of the fly. In The Tyger, William Blake explains that there is more that meets the eye when one examines the Creator and his creation, the tiger. The persona is never defined.
All throughout the poem the persona questions the Creator of the tiger to determine if the Creator is demonic or godlike. The poem reflects primarily the personas response to the tiger, rather than the tiger s response to the world. The persona is curious about the location of the Creator of the tiger when he says, In what distant deeps or skies (5). In this quote the persona is trying to figure out where exactly the Creator is located He wants to know if hes in Hell or in Heaven. The words deeps or skies could have many meanings.
According to Index Nath Kher... The images of deeps and skies indicate usual theological expressions for Hell and Heaven... This leads to the ambiguity of the doubleness of the tiger, and it suggests that either God or the Devil, or both, could have been responsible for Creation. The persona is also wondering what does the Creator looks like when he says, And what shoulder, and what art, / Could twist the sinews of thy heart? (9).
These lines speak of the power and strength of the tiger, and of its maker. Shoulders and art both carry responsibilities and burdens and sinews are the tendons that make the heart work, and they are also known as a source of strength and power. So if God is the Creator, he is a strong and powerful force. Also Index Nath Kher agrees that the Creator must be a powerful force he says, The Creator is shown to be the strongest of creatures and the greatest of artists...
It is only He who can twist the sinews of the heart of His Creation. Hes simply referring to God as the Creator when he use the word He this is a word for Christ or God. Because of the magnificence of Gods creation the reader learns that the creator is omnipotent. Blake may have done this to get the reader to think who did make the tiger, As so many of Blakes lyrics, part of the poems strategy is to resist attempts to imprint meaning upon it The Tyger tempts us to a cognitive apprehension but in the end exhaust our efforts (McGann).
Theres more than one answer to this question. If the reader was a religious person they would know that God created every living creature on this world including the tiger. So the answer to them would be that God created the tiger. The reader will also come to that conclusion from this quote, Did he who made the Lamb make thee? (20). As the reader read this paper one will learn that the Creator in the poem The Lamb is God so the reader will know that the Creator of the tiger could be the same Creator as that of the lamb. Derek Furr writes, On one hand this is a reference to the God of the Bible; but on the other, it could be a reference to Blake himself...
Surely, the poem is as awe-inspiring as it is ambiguous. One that is of no religion would think other wise or maybe one wouldnt care who made the tiger. Blake uses literary devices such as symbols, and imagery to develop his theme. Blakes style of writing in The Tyger contains six four-line stanzas, and uses pairs of rhyming couplets to create a sense of rhythm and continuity throughout the poem.
The majority of the lines in this poem contain exactly seven syllables, alternating between stress and unstressed syllables (Poetry for Students). An example from the poem is, Tyger! Tyger! burning bright (1), the Ty, burn, and right is the stressed syllables and the rest of the word is unstressed this pattern is known as trochaic tetrameter. A trochaic tetrameter is four pairs of stressed and unstressed syllables even though the final trochee lacks the unstressed syllable. A trochee is one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable.
Derek Furr writes, Strung together, trochees sound like a chant... Blake drops the unstressed syllable from the last foot of each line. Were stopped in our tracks, as it were, held in suspense-just as Blakes questions hold us in suspense. Another example of a trochee is, In the forests of the night (2). This style of writing makes the poem exciting to read, it gets the readers attention. This style show how different Blake is from other poets during that time.
Blake uses symbols to express the strength of the tiger and its Creator. The main symbol in The Tyger is the tiger itself, The tiger is formed on anvil of inspiration which is the eye of man and God, but it is also a symbol of the very same eye which created it (Adams). A tiger is a large Asian carnivorous mammal of the cat family or a fierce, daring, or aggressive person or quality. The word fire is used to illustrate the aggressive personality of the tiger, Burnt the fire of thine eyes? (6).
The fire can be used to describe the way the tiger sees and is seen by other people. When a person see or come in contact with a tiger the person gets tense right away because one know that one false move the tiger may attack. This example shows how destructive / aggressive the tiger can be just like a wild fire. The Creator could also be described as a destructive person too because what kind of person would make an aggressive animal. This might be a representation of himself. According to Index Nath Kher the symbol of fire is dominant in the structure of the poem...
To know the source of the fire is to know the origin of the Creator. Blake relates the tigers environment to one during the Industrial Revolution when he says, What the hammer? What the chain? / In what furnace was thy brain? (13 - 14). This symbolizes what Blakes childhood was like to him. It was like an industrial factory and that the tigers thinking and his creation began in a furnace. This is so because when Blake wrote this poem it was during the French Revolution, that was a time of suffering for so many people.
Blake is interesting his environment through the tigers environment. Blake uses good c...
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