“Did he who made the Lamb make thee?": The Act of Creation in Blake's The Tyger

Blake revised The Tyger more than any other, and consideration of the revisions makes it clear that the poem is not a probing of good and evil but a statement affirming the dreadful tiger’s divinity. In the first draft, he does probe the meaning of the tiger as a symbol of evil – for he emphasises the tiger’s dreadfulness and cruelty and portrays it as a bloody horror. In the second stage he emphasises the tiger’s divine origin and adds a stanza which suggests that the tiger and the lamb have a common creator, and he omits most of the tiger’s dreadful attributes. In the third stage he restores some of its dreadfulness and retains a suggestion of its divine origin for the climax. And so we get its two ‘contraries’ – its “deadly terrors” and the divinity in which it participates by having been created by an “immortal hand or eye”. But the point now is that the tiger is dreadful and deadly not because it is evil but because its substance is power – the power of that energy which will return man to Eden. And so, we can be certain that the creator of the tiger was none other than the creator of the lamb, and he did “smile his work to see”.

The poem is thus essentially positive in its expression of the general idea that Edenic innocence is to be attained only through the bitterness of Experience. But it also goes beyond this conception of the “two contrary states of the human soul" to show that Innocence, when it is in danger of being destroyed by repression, may become transformed into a wrathful energy and turn, as Mark Schorer suggests, “into something else, indeed into the tiger”. (To attain the dawn, one may have to act in the forests of the night). 

Blake’s vision acknowledges that the echoing green of Innocence is replaced by the dark, sinister world of Experience. As a romantic visionary, he sought some “ultimate synthesis in which innocence might be wedded to experience, goodness to knowledge” (C. M. Bowra). Thus, in the first poem of Songs of Experience, he summons the fallen soul of earth to turn to “the break of day”, Blake’s symbol of the new life in which both Innocence and Experience are transformed. The true Innocence is not that of the Songs of Innocence, but something which has gained knowledge from the ugly lessons of experience and found new strength in the unfettered life of the creative soul. This consummation can come only beyond experience and is possible only through passion, energy and power. So, Blake stresses the great forces hidden in man. Only the release and exercise of these awful, perhaps terrible, powers can make regeneration possible. Obviously then, Blake chooses his symbols for these powers in violent, destructive things: “the tigers of wrath are wiser than horses of destruction.” 

Likewise, in Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake discovers a similar elemental force as symbols for the redemption of mankind: “The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword are portions of humanity, too great for the eye of man.” Such wrath, emblematised in the tiger, was the means by which Blake hoped to unite innocence and experience in some tremendous synthesis – and hence Blake emphasises on its “fearful symmetry”. To reiterate the point, the tiger symbolises the fierce forces in the soul which are needed to break the bond of experience. The forests of the night are ignorance, repression, and superstition. The tiger has been fashioned by some wondrous, unknown being, like Los, and this happened when “the stars threw down their spears”. 

Martin Nurmi points out that in Blake’s work in general, stars symbolise the rigidly categorical restrictions imposed upon man by laws derived from abstract reason, and the weeping of stars symbolises at the cosmic level an apocalyptic melting or breaking down of these barriers separating man from his humanity, a return of man from the forest of night. The image of the stars throwing down their spears and weeping (whether in repentance or the unrepentant anguish of defeat) is a symbol of the victory of freedom, and this victory is a result of the creation of the tiger. The creation of the tiger thus advances the cause of freedom and regeneration, and once again we can be certain that the creator both smiled at his work to see and was also the creator of the lamb. The tiger and the lamb are indeed two different states of the human soul: “When the lamb is destroyed by experience, the tiger is needed to restore the world.” (Bowra)