William Blake - The Lamb and The Tyger

I will be discussing Blake's The Lamb (p.g 79) and The Tyger (p.g 88-89) and comparing them to each other and my analysis. Blake has two very different poems parallel each other with an amazing fluid tone. The Lamb has an innocent tone and The Tyger with the uncertain reality.

In, The Lamb, Blake asks the "little lamb" who made thee and gave him his "tender voice" and "clothing wooly bright". Then in the second paragraph he answers the question posed earlier, It is God, or if you look at the line "He is called by thy name, For he calls himself a Lamb", "he is meek and he is mild, he became like a child"; you can see this is Jesus, as he was known as the Lamb of God in the New Testament, and came to Earth as a child. So Jesus is the Lamb who represents the innocence with that the faith, hope, and love of God. Jesus is just like a lamb, which in ancient times was used as a sacrifice to their Gods, just as Jesus sacrificed himself to let humans have a second chance with God. This poem is very joyous with lines such as "bless thee", "clothing wooly bright" and "Making all the vales rejoice".

The Lamb was written first, by Blake, and shows the more innocent side of God and what he has created. By contrast, in The Tyger, Blake writes about a darker form of creation, in a pessimistic, uncertain and urgent questioning of how can God create the tiger?

"Tyger Tyger, burning bright.
In the forest of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"

This stanza seems to admire and dread the question of who could create something with such "fearful symmetry?" He goes on to ask who created this animal, just as The Lamb asked the same question. But the words he uses such as "dread hand and what dread feet", "What the hammer? what the chain," and "In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil", all give off a symbolism of the times, the industrial revolution. It is pretty obvious by these specifically chosen words that Blake knew the Industrial revolution was part of a bigger plan and would change the world as he knew it for better and for worse. The pessimistic and dreading idea of the inevitable answer that the one that made the Lamb also made the Tiger is questioned in this poem, "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?"

The Tyger poem was written after The Lamb, as said before, and to comapre the two; The Lamb has all of its questions answered, even though they were rhetorical. The innocent tone and wording of The Lamb makes it easy for a child to understand, just as the church does in Sunday school when I would go and they would make everything so clear cut, everything was so Black and white. But as seen in The Tyger, life is not Black and white, there are a lot of Grey areas and a simple wish of faith may be sustainable for some people, but Blake did not answer his questions posed in The Tyger, even his last sentence of the poem is the same question asked in the first stanza. Really God (or whatever deity you desire) created both the lamb and the tiger and did so with a purpose, to counter balance each other and keep the world in harmony, just like everything else in nature.