The Tyger

In William Blake's poem "The Tyger", the tyger is presented as a fierce and powerful creature that wanders the forests in the darkness of night. The poem reads almost as if a child is curiously asking question after question about this tyger. The tyger is a mystery to the child and Blake never answers any of the questions throughout the poem keeping the tyger mysterious. However, the fact that none of the childlike questions are answered allows the poem to be interpreted in many different ways and also creates many paradoxes. 

There are three key paradoxes in "The Tyger" that Blake has created with his childlike questioning; the creation of the tiger through the industrial process, the comparison between the lamb and the tiger, and the similarities between the first and last stanza. Blake wonders who could create such a powerful creature with a perfect symmetry and appearance in line 3 where he says, "What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry". He goes on to question if it was God in the "distant skies, or rather Satan in the "deeps" that created this marvelous creature. He continues to further question the making of the tiger in questioning, "what the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was they brain?". Blake is paralleling the making of the tiger to the making of our society and industrialization. Blake then speculates about how God created humans and questions if humans were constructed industriously as well as the tiger. Blake, an opponent of the industrialization process, believed that this industrialized part of the tiger was evil because it was related to the industrial process. Blake continues on however to reject "Satan" and continue to believe that everything was created by God thus showing that the tiger has angelic ties and truly cannot be evil. The next important symbol in the poem was the lamb which can be viewed as the opposite of the "tyger". Blake questions whether God could create two such different creatures when he asks, "Did he who make the lamb make thee?". The tiger is such a fierce, powerful animal, and the lamb such a gentle animal and here Blake is questioning how they can fit in in the same world. The last important paradox is the similarities between the first and last stanzas. Each word is the same aside from "could". In the last stanza "could" is changed to "dare thy fearful symmetry", this is a much stringer statement, less wondering than the first stanza, more powerful and asking who is brazen enough to create this tiger, different than any other animal. Who would "dare" to challenge nature with this tiger of  "fearful symmetry". The tiger is used throughout the poem to contrast between good and evil, peaceful and violent. The use of the tiger and the lamb allow for a different perspective on the changing world to be understood.