Line Of The Poem example essay topic

How wonderful this poem becomes when it is seen as part of this whole fabric in contrast to The Songs of Innocence, most especially The Lamb. In this context, this poem becomes a psalm to the wondrous work of the Creator, who created both the innocent beauty of nature and the awesome grandeur of hell and its inhabitants. Seeing it in this light makes the previously mentioned line even more important, perhaps the "thesis" line of the poem or even the group of poems. Even the title, Songs of Experience, takes on new significance.

We have to think of the incident in the garden when Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. That is the first recorded learning experience. By contrasting the images of this poem to those of The Lamb, we can see that this poem may be referring to something more primordial when the poet uses the "forests of the night". Perhaps the night even stands for that final darkness which would be the condemnation of the soul to the infernos which Blake's contemporary, Dante, was describing. Blake even did some illustrations for Dante, so we know he was certainly familiar with this view. When Blake asks the questions about the creator of the Tyger, they take on much more spiritual significance if we assume that the Tyger symbolized Lucifer.

It would be a much more amazing thing to contemplate who made both the Savior and the Devil than just to contemplate the two opposite animals. We know from the first poem that the Lamb symbolizes Christ, so this could easily be the opposite. "What the hammer! what the chain" is a really difficult line unless we consider that the hammer would be that of the blacksmith, making the chain that which he uses to lower the glowing meat from the forge into the cold water to cool it. The poet would have known about the process of tempering for Toledo steel, and could have seen this Tyger as a creation of a master who "tempered" His creations with repeated exposure to the fire and then the cooling water. That this poem takes as its subject the opposing forces to the savior, and uses the imagery of a Tyger in a dark primordial forest makes it stronger, but no less romantic. The Poem is highly spiritual and the images are quite fantastic when considered as tools of the Creator.

The repeated sequence makes even more since in this context, as Satan would have had quite "fearful symmetry" to people of Blake's time. We must remember that we are talking about a difference of 200 years between then and now, and the difference between then and the time of witch trials was no longer. The Spanish inquisition was not so distant in the past at that time either, so we can see that people would have taken Christian religion a lot more seriously than many do today. Blake was an especially spiritual poet and artist and it was documented that he began seeing visions at age four, and there is no reason to assume that these did not continue. Are we seeing Blake's expression of his reactions to his awesome visions, both wonderful and terrifying? "The importance attached both to nature and to the empirical in Blake is affirmed in "There Is No Natural Religion", where the points are made that the human being "is only a natural organ subject to sense", that perception occurs through bodily organs, that organic perceptions mean organic thoughts, and that desires and perceptions "must be limited to objects of sense" (Lawson) Blake certainly was investigating the reality of the world and of religion, and was, perhaps, tormented by fears of being wrong, wondering what was the true nature of existence.

It really is not so far a stretch when you consider that he was thought to be mad by many contemporaries. Think about other famous artists and poets and we can see that they all seem to have a sort of madness which drives them. Blake certainly may have reconciled a condition of manic depression to some burden t or blessing put upon him by God. The images in this poem take on so much more significance if we see them as more than a poet's invention to express his theme. Could they have been real to Blake?