The Lam and the Tyger Analysis

The Lamb and The Tyger

What makes William Blake poems intriguing? Blake shares his interpretation of the Biblical story of creation in his poems, “The Lamb” and “The Tyger.” The two poems share similar themes such as questioning the creator, God, and the progression through the poems themselves. They also perfectly contrast each other as they show the dichotomy of how they are physically described and why they might have been created in the first place. The contrast between the poems also points to a deeper contrast in the ideas which each poem represents.

In “The Lamb,” Blake immediately poses the question: “who made thee?” (1) Blake goes on and describes the lamb and doesn’t answer the question until the second half of the poem both directly and indirectly. He directly answers that it is God who created the lamb in the last two lines. Understanding the indirect references to the creator of the lamb requires knowledge of Christian metaphors. In the Christian tradition, Jesus, the son of God, is also known as the Lamb of God. This is stated in the fourth line of the second stanza; “For He calls Himself a Lamb.” (14). Even though Jesus is the son of God, it is also in the Christian tradition that they are also the same person. So to be compared as Jesus is the same as being compared as God. The description of God’s temperament, “He is meek, and He is mild,” (14) reflects the temperament of a lamb as well. Blake is showing that God made the lamb in his own image.

In “The Tyger,” Blake once again asks the question about who make the tiger. But he does not ask it in the first line, only the last two lines of the first stanza: “What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” (3) Similar to “The Lamb,” Blake first goes on to provide a description of the tiger and doesn’t begin to address who is the creator of the tiger until the last stanza. Unlike in “The Lamb,” Blake does not directly answer his initially posed question. Instead, Blake wonders if...