Romanticism - William Blake

Context: Biography

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·            Born on 28th November 1757, the son of a hosier.  He grew up in London.

·            Liberal household of the dissenting tradition, meaning that they rejected the Church of England.  It is thought that they belonged to the Moravian religious sect.

·            The bible was of supreme importance in Blake’s childhood, and influenced much of his own work in concepts, themes and style.

Education

·            From the age of ten Blake did not go to school.  His father let him pursue his own studies at home, and sent him to ‘drawing school’ at the age of ten.  Blake later wrote, ‘Thank God I was never sent to school / To be Flog’d into following the Style of a Fool’.  His approach was always anti-authoritarian.

·            His early influences and explorations included the work of Raphael, Michelangelo and Dürer, and the poetry of Ben Jonson and Edmund Spenser.

·            In 1772 he was apprenticed to an engraver, James Basire, at the age of 14.

·            In 1779 he became a student at the Royal Academy.

Visions

·            The visions that Blake experienced are sometimes called ‘eidetic imagery.’ They are real sensory perceptions, not just imagination, and the tendency to have them can be very high in some young children.  It is, however, unusual to retain this ‘ability’ into adulthood.

·            Blake saw visions from early childhood.  At the age of four he saw God’s head at the window and started screaming.  His mother later beat him for running in and saying that he had seen the Prophet Ezekiel under a tree in the fields (this seems to have been the only time he was beaten by either of his parents).  Later childhood visions included angels in a tree and angels walking among haymakers who were working in fields.  Blake felt that visions were a ‘true’ perception of reality, seeing past the ‘fallen world.’

Work

·            During his apprenticeship to Basire, Blake worked in Westminster Abbey, engraving the tombs and effigies.  He was influenced by its gothic style, faded brightness and colour.

·            At the Royal Academy, Blake rebelled against what he regarded as the unfinished style of fashionable painters such as Rubens.  He disliked the school’s first president, Joshua Reynolds, especially his pursuit of ‘general truth’ and ‘general beauty’.  Blake continued to prefer the bold, unfashionable lines of artists such as Raphael, rather than the ‘blurred’ and ‘muddy’ oil-paintings that were fashionable at the time.

·            Blake had some paintings exhibited at the Academy, but did not enjoy critical success in his lifetime.  In his later life he was known as an engraver, not a poet or artist.  He was a worker, part of the new commercialism, and died almost penniless.  In this sense, he should not be bracketed with the upper class ‘Romantic poets’ such as Byron and Keats.

Marriage

·            Blake married Catherine Boucher in 1782.  She was five years younger than him and was illiterate.  Blake trained her to be an engraver, and she helped him throughout her life.  They seem to have remained close throughout their marriage, though they were unable to have children.  At one point Blake suggested bringing in a concubine (this was in accordance with the beliefs of the Swedenborgian Society), but Catherine was distressed by the idea.

Views

·            Anti-authoritarian.

·            Equality for women: feminist Mary Wollstonecraft was a close friend, and Blake illustrated her Original Stories from Real Life (1788).

·            They shared views on sexual equality and the institution of marriage.  In 1793’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Blake condemned the cruel absurdity of enforced chastity and marriage without love and defended the right of women to complete self-fulfillment.

·            Racial equality.

·            Rejected the restrictions of the Old Testament God, and saw the New Testament God as a positive influence.

·            Portrayed the upper class institutions and the Church of England as corrupt and exploitative.

Religion

·            Blake has been linked to Swedenborgianism – a religious organisation developed from the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg.  Many aspects are closely related to Christianity, and the movement is founded on the belief that Swedenborg witnessed the Last Judgment and Second Advent of the Lord.

·            Beliefs – one God, the Holy Trinity.  Evil originates in mankind and should be shunned.  A person’s fate after death depends on the character of the person in life – those who love the Lord or love being useful to others are in heaven, and those governed by self-love or love of material things are in hell.  Marriage is eternal, and those with a true spiritual marriage will find their spouse in the afterlife.  All religions are valid paths to heaven if they acknowledge God and teach charity towards others.  They also believe in extraterrestrial life.

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Links to the Songs

Find examples of poems that demonstrate these themes:

• New Testament Christian focus on love, charity and forgiveness

• opposition of Old versus New Testament

• anti-authoritarian views

• visions

• strong visual imagery

• the ‘Human Condition’

• against official education or relating to the treatment of children.

Other writers influenced by the religion include: Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Elizabeth and Robert Browning, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman.

The sun does arise,

And make happy the skies.

The merry bells ring

To welcome the Spring.

The sky-lark and thrush,

The birds of the bush,

Sing louder around,

To the bells’ cheerful sound. 

While our sports shall be seen

On the Ecchoing Green.

Old John, with white hair 

Does laugh away care,

Sitting under the oak,

Among the old folk, 

They laugh at our play, 

And soon they all say.

‘Such, such were the joys. 

When we all girls & boys, 

In our youth-time were seen, 

On the Ecchoing Green.’

Till the little ones weary

No more can be merry

The sun does descend,

And our sports have an end: 

Round the laps of their mothers, 

Many sisters and brothers,

Like birds in their nest,

Are ready for rest;

And sport no more seen,

On the darkening Green. 

The images in this poem are both pastoral and idyllic. The poet makes intensive use of sounds in the first stanza to present the happy innocence of childhood. The sunrise is symbolic of youth and immaturity and the ‘merry bells’ set the tone for the birds, which are the sky-lark and thrush, both noted for the beauty and cheerfulness of their songs. The semantic field of stanza 1 is shown in phrases such as ‘make happy’, ‘merry bells’, ‘welcome’, ‘chearful sound’, ‘our sports’, all of which suggest the carefree days of youth when there was nothing to do but play. The phrase ‘the echoing green’ implies that Nature itself is implicated in the joyful scene and reflects the happiness of the people in it.

The second stanza depicts the ‘old folk’ sitting under the protective shade of the oak tree. They too are shown as innocent because they remember the guiltless days of their own childhood when they would play on the green. Their laughter shows that they are involved with the happy children and are pleased for them. One person, ‘Old John’ is singled out as he ‘laughs away care’, showing that he has attained wisdom and has been able to put aside the cares and worries of experience.

In the final stanza, the children are shown to be ‘weary’ [a word reminiscent of experience] and are unable to be merry any more, implying that the games of childhood are coming to an end – along with its innocence, perhaps? With the sunset, the coming of darkness is prophetic of the onset of adolescence. The ‘sports have an end’ and the children are compared to ‘birds in their nest’, safe for the moment but soon to fly into the world of experience. The image of ‘the darkening green’ with which the poem ends is symbolic of the necessary move into the world of adulthood and experience which Wordsworth memorably described in Intimations of Immortality as

‘shades of the prison house begin to close around the growing boy’.

The children, here beginning the dangerous journey into a world of oppression and false ideas, need guidance from someone like Old John, who has come through experience to wisdom and knows the pitfalls of the path.

The rhythm of the poem is a spritely movement which is very like a hobby horse and suggests nursery rhymes such as ‘Ride a cock horse’ or ‘The North Wind doth blow’. It thus reflects very well the games and sports of the children as they play out of doors. It also carries them forward perhaps all too quickly towards the ‘darkening green’ at the end of the poem – childhood is a short time compared with adulthood. This impetus is maintained by the rhyming couplets and the simple words, most of which have one or two syllables, except for ‘echoing’ and ‘darkening’ – the words that describe the green where they play.

In the pictures, Blake shows the oak as the tree of life, protecting adults and children alike; he also shows ‘Old John’ as the wise guide leading the children, although some have opted for the vine which has the entwined trunks of earthly love. A boy is handing a bunch of grapes down to a girl – perhaps symbolising how adolescence leads to the end of innocence. Those who have experience but not wisdom cannot lead others safely.

Like the Introduction, Blake is showing that the state of innocence, depicted as a kind of earthly paradise, cannot last – and nor should it, since it is dangerously naïve when it is set in a country where repressive laws and exploitation are the norm for poorer people.

Little Lamb who made thee

Dost thou know who made thee

Gave thee life & bid thee feed.

By the stream & o’er the mead;

Gave thee clothing of delight,

Softest clothing wooly bright;

Gave thee such a tender voice,

Making all the vales rejoice!

Little Lamb who made thee

Dost thou know who made thee

Little Lamb I’ll tell thee,

Little Lamb I’ll tell thee!

He is called by thy name,

For he calls himself a Lamb:

He is meek & he is mild,

He became a little child:

I a child & thou a lamb,

We are called by his name.

Little Lamb God bless thee.

Little Lamb God bless thee.

In this deceptively simple poem Blake uses a child as the narrator who asks the questions and then answers them.  The questions, which are interconnected and repetitive, are both simple and profound – ‘who made thee?’ This addresses the most important ideas that people have about where we came from and who we are. By putting this question into the mouth of an innocent child, addressing that most innocent of creatures, a lamb, Blake shows that children often go to the heart of existence because they have not yet learned to complicate things. You have only to watch an adult’s reaction to the question, ‘Where did I come from?’ to realise this. The answer given by the child in the poem equally reveals innocence – the lamb was made by he who ‘calls himself a lamb’ just as the child was made by he who ‘became a little child’. This association of child and lamb with Jesus follows the ideas proposed in the Introduction and in ‘The Shepherd’. The depiction of Jesus as the child of the nativity and as the lamb is reinforced by the description, ‘He is meek and he is mild’, reminiscent of Christmas carols – almost, one might say, the Jesus of Innocence, but also the Jesus who protected children in the New Testament by saying that for those who abused them, ‘it were better for them that a millstone were put around their neck and they were cast into the river’. This is also the Jesus who told people, ‘unless you become as little children, you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven.’

It is this idea that permeates the Songs of Innocence. Blake himself retained this wonderful ability to see things from a childlike viewpoint, as he shows in this poem; he argues the need for the imagination and simplicity of the child to remain as a guiding light through the darkening world of experience.  The world of experience is notably absent from ‘The Lamb’.  The engraving depicts the naked child feeding the lambs under a protective arch of trees, outside a simple country cottage. The first stanza is full of images of Nature – ‘by the stream’, ‘o’er the mead’, ‘all the vales’, and of happiness, ‘clothing of delight’, ‘softest clothing woolly bright’, ‘tender voice’, ‘vales rejoice’. The physical environment of the lamb is characterised by life, food, ‘clothing’ and gentle noises. The stream here is the water of life and the meadows and valleys are made for the lambs and children to enjoy freely.

In the second stanza where the child answers the question, ‘who made thee?’ there is a movement from the physical to the spiritual as the child talks about Jesus as the creator of both lamb and child. The poem finishes on a short, childlike prayer, ‘Little Lamb, God bless thee.’ The repetitive nature of the poem gives it the quality of a child’s prayer or hymn and the simple rhythm, reinforced by the use of assonance, supports this impression (it could be sung to the tune of ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’!) as does the rhyme scheme, which is in rhyming couplets – although ‘name’ and ‘lamb’ are only half-rhymes.  Although it is less obvious to modern readers, the repetition of the pronoun ‘thee’ gives a feeling of familiarity and closeness between the child and the lamb.

Blake’s own religious views centred very much on Jesus as the mediator between humanity and the one true God – since he was both human and divine, just as Blake felt people to be. When he was asked if he believed in the divinity of Christ, Blake replied, ‘Yes, Christ was divine … but then so are you and so am I’. He saw Jesus as the figure that put forgiveness at the centre of the Christian religion and Love as its most important duty. As such he was the antithesis of the tyrannical, demanding God that used fear to enforce oppressive laws, all beginning ‘Thou shalt not …’The emphasis on the lamb in the Songs of Innocence is a reminder that Jesus was a saviour who sacrificed his life for the redemption of all people. This is an echo of the Jewish Passover feast, which is celebrated by the slaughter and eating of a lamb and the time in Egypt when the blood of the lamb placed over the doorway was a signal to the angel of death not to enter the house.

When my mother died I was very young,

And my father sold me while yet my tongue

Could scarcely cry " 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!"

So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.

There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head

That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved, so I said,

"Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bare,

You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair."

And so he was quiet, & that very night,

As Tom was a-sleeping he had such a sight!

That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, & Jack,

Were all of them locked up in coffins of black;

And by came an Angel who had a bright key,

And he opened the coffins & set them all free;

Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing they run,

And wash in a river and shine in the Sun.

Then naked & white, all their bags left behind,

They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind.

And the Angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,

He'd have God for his father & never want joy.

And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark

And got with our bags & our brushes to work.

Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm;

So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

The simple and direct narrative comes from a child – in this instance a little chimney sweep. Perhaps even more than children who were set to work in factories or mines or the many other forms of labour that children had to endure, the chimney sweeps had a particularly miserable existence. There were a lot of them, for one thing, since every house had a chimney. They were generally very young, since many of the chimneys had awkward bends that required tiny bodies. It was a horrible job meaning that they had skin engrained with soot, permanently inflamed eyes, burns from the hot bricks and often unhealed sores where their skin had rubbed off against the chimney sides. The daily distortion of still-growing bones meant that many of them were crippled and their lungs were filled with the choking soot. If they were reluctant to engage in the terrible task, they were beaten, or fires were lit underneath them to force them up the chimney. They were kept by a master and they slept in dormitories on the floor, with few facilities for washing, and given little other than a space to sleep and some food. Blake deplored the society that could treat small children in such a way and exploit them for money; even more the parents who would sell their children to a master in such a trade, although poverty often dictated this course.

In this poem we see Blake using satire to express his anger. The poem appears to be a simple story told by the child and it is his viewpoint that the reader sees. The child reports how his mother died while he was still little (perhaps in childbirth or as a result of complications, which was a major cause of death among women) and his father sold him before he could even speak properly. Blake deliberately shows his first words as ‘weep weep weep weep’ as he has little cause to do anything else. Literally, the words suggest the lisping child plying his trade, ‘sweep, sweep’, but, with the repetition, also sound like a small bird, thus emphasising the vulnerability of the child as well as his unhappiness. The following line points an accusing finger at the reader with the use of the pronoun, ‘Your chimneys I sweep’ which shows the complicity of all adults in this cruel exploitation. The continuation of the line, ‘in soot I sleep’ shows the impossibility of any escape from the filthy conditions imposed upon the children.

The tale of ‘little Tom Dacre’, personalises the narrative, giving an identity to this child sweep which ensures that the audience are aware of the boys as individuals. Tom cries when his head is shaved, a normal practice for the infant sweeps. His hair is described as ‘curl’d like a lambs back’ which refers to his innocence and to the idea of Tom as a victim, being sacrificed. The narrator, in a heartbreaking imitation of an adult, advises him that it is all for the best, so ‘the soot cannot spoil your white hair’, which also contrasts the angelic nature of the child with the darkness of the soot and, by implication, with the evil of those who exploit him. Tom’s dream symbolises the position the little chimney sweeps are in, ‘lock’d up in coffins of black’, which represents the enslavement of the children, the claustrophobic dark chimneys and the living death they endure daily. In the dream an angel, a heavenly messenger, with ‘a bright key’ opens the coffins and ‘set them all free’. They find themselves in an earthly paradise where they run over ‘a green plain’ and wash in the river of life. This symbolises the change in their condition, from exploited slaves to free, playing children, which is the condition that Blake wants for all children. It also shows the children as ‘naked and white’, and therefore in a state of innocence, having washed off all traces of their enslavement and misery. They also ‘rise upon clouds’ which, like the child in Introduction, suggests that they are associated with the spirit of imagination and it is this that sets them free – perhaps this is also symbolised by the ‘bright key’ of the angel which releases them from physical bondage into the paradise of imagination.

The conclusion of the poem appears to be clichéd, but it is put in childlike terms. Thus Blake is showing the way in which children trust and believe what adults tell them. It is ironic in the sense that when the angel tells Tom, ‘if he’d be a good boy / He’d have God for his father & never want joy’ the interpretation of being ‘a good boy’ would mean different things to Blake and to some of his readers. For those who exploited children, or supported the status quo, it would mean that he should obey his master and not complain about his miserable life and then he would get his reward in heaven; for Blake, however, it would mean that he would be true to his imagination which Blake saw as the divine part of human beings. In the same way, the final line, ‘So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm’ is ambiguous: it could mean the duty to be a good and cheerful worker, or it could mean the duty owed by the individual to preserve his innocence through dreams and the use of poetic imagination.

A little black thing among the snow,

Crying "weep! 'weep!" in notes of woe!

"Where are thy father and mother? say?"

"They are both gone up to the church to pray.

Because I was happy upon the heath,

And smil'd among the winter's snow,

They clothed me in the clothes of death,

And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

And because I am happy and dance and sing,

They think they have done me no injury,

And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King,

Who make up a heaven of our misery."

A much more sombre poem than that with the same title in Songs of Innocence, where the little sweeps could escape through the power of imagination, this poem shows the parents of the little sweep as jealous of his innocent freedom and happiness.

The poem opens with an onlooker describing

‘A little black thing among the snow:

Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe!’

The contrast between the black sooty figure of the child and the white snow brings to mind both conventional dead metaphors about good and evil and Blake’s subversion of these in poems such as ‘The Little Black Boy’. Clearly Blake does not intend the child himself to be seen as evil, but rather what has happened to him – the conspiracy in the adult world to force him into this dreadful occupation. This is shown in his cries of ‘weep, weep’ which recalls the professional cry of the sweep asking for hire, but also shows the misery of his situation as they are ‘notes of woe!’ When the onlooker asks, ‘Where are thy father and mother? say?’ the little sweep becomes the narrator for the rest of the poem, as he gives an answer that reveals Blake’s anger at his treatment and compassion for his condition. He tells the reader that his parents have ‘both gone up to the church to pray’. This shows the hypocrisy of the parents in this outward religious observance, while they sell their child into slavery as an apprentice sweep.

The second stanza clearly reveals one of Blake’s themes in the songs of experience – that of the jealous adults who cannot bear to see the innocent world of imagination that they no longer inhabit, without trying to destroy it. This is made obvious by the first word of the second stanza:

‘Because I was happy upon the heath,

And smil’d among the winters snow:

They clothed me in the clothes of death,

And taught me to sing the notes of woe.’

It is the child’s innocent happiness as he plays and sings that have caused the jealous parents to cut short his childhood – and, in this occupation, his life, as the phrase ‘clothes of death’ emphasises. Unlike in the poem of the same name from Songs of Innocence, there is no ‘angel with a bright key’ to set him free into the world of imagination. There is a hint that some of this world remains with the child when he says:

‘And because I am happy, & dance & sing,

They think they have done me no injury’

– but everyone knows that children can still play and seem happy even in the most dreadful situations; the parents cannot be unaware of the kind of life their son must be leading. The suggestion is that the parents are colluding with the Church and the State:

‘And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King

Who make up a heaven of our misery.’

The final line is reminiscent of the ‘Clod and the Pebble’ where jealous love ‘builds a hell in heaven’s despite.’ Blake accuses the people who should be protecting children – the parents, the King whose duty is to protect all his subjects, and the priests who owe a Christian duty of care towards all, especially children, of creating a hell on earth for them instead. The simple, direct language that Blake uses reveals the hypocrisy of the adults through the words of a child. 

The poem makes use of a narrator who is addressing the rose – the symbol of love – with the words, ‘thou art sick.’ The image of a blighted rose, which has had its beauty spoiled by an invisible maggot is continued in the following lines. The worm, which has connotations of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, is associated with sex, both by its resemblance to the penis and because, in the Bible story, it was the serpent who tempted Adam and Eve to gain knowledge, including sexual knowledge, which led to their downfall. There are also references to the ‘catterpiller’ which is used by Blake to symbolise a destroyer. ‘The invisible worm’ is a secret agent and it flies ‘in the night’, under cover of darkness and in ‘the howling storm’, a symbol of confusion and of passions, but also of materialism.  Nevertheless it has ‘found out thy bed / of crimson joy’.  The bed can mean both the rose bed and the lover’s bed and the crimson joy represents both the colour of the rose (the colour of passion) and the female genitals. In this case the passion is deadly for, ‘his dark secret love / Does thy life destroy.’ This can have a physical meaning in the shape of sexually transmitted disease, but it can also mean that relationships that have to be furtive and shameful are destroyed by this need for secrecy. Some people have seen the sickness as psychological, a result of unacted desires. Blake wanted love to be free and open and people to enjoy each other without the church telling them it was forbidden and sinful. This can be associated with other poems, such as ‘The Garden of Love’, where the priests ‘bind with briars / my joys and desires’ and also with ‘London’ where ‘the youthful harlot’s curse / blights with plagues the marriage hearse.’

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infants cry of fear,

In every voice: in every ban,

The mind-forg’d manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry

Every black’ning Church appalls,

And the hapless Soldiers sigh

Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlots curse

Blasts the new-born Infants tear

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

One of the bleakest poems in the collection has Blake, the narrator, wandering the streets of his home city and noting the misery around him.

‘I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow’

The word ‘chartered’ refers to the granting of rights to land or rents, the implication being that most of London is owned by a small number of people or corporations. It also has connotations of ‘charting’ or mapping out, with its hints of confining and defining limits. There is also an ironic association with the idea of a charter of rights, which does not extend to the poor and dispossessed. As the wanderer continues, he encounters others,

‘And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.’

The use of the word ‘mark’ to mean ‘notice’ is balanced by its second use to mean ‘signs’ and what the observer notices is signs of weakness and woe. The weakness can mean physical or moral or both and is combined with ‘woe’ to show a condition of unhappiness and debility in the citizens. The repetition serves to point up the number of marks that are visible. From using sight to observe, the narrator turns to hearing to record his impressions:

‘In every cry of every Man,

In every Infants cry of fear,

In every voice; in every ban,

The mind-forged manacles I hear’.

This is the central image of the poem and the central image of the songs of experience. The manacles are chains and handcuffs which prisoners would have to wear and which were also used to prevent slaves from escaping. The image of London’s poor being enslaved by the ‘establishment’ is also an echo of Rousseau’s comment, ‘Man was born free and everywhere he is in chains.’ The description of the manacles as ‘mind-forged’ refers not only to the way in which the poor are oppressed legally, but also to the way in which they are ‘brainwashed’ by the Church into believing that the poverty of their condition is ordained by God and they will enjoy their reward in heaven.

It is also indicative of the way in which the people acquiesce in this state of affairs, instead of rebelling against their oppressors. The universal nature of this way of thinking is suggested by the repetition of ‘every’, while the use of ‘Man’ (meaning Mankind) and ‘Infant’ further shows that it includes all age groups. The writer also uses the phrase ‘in every ban’ to bring home the repressive nature of the society in which these people live.

The use of the sense of hearing is continued in the following stanza: we hear the ‘Chimney- sweepers cry’ and the ‘hapless Soldiers sigh’. The chimney sweepers are representative of the abused and enslaved children whose conditions so enraged Blake and the adjective ‘blackening’ is associated with the child’s appearance, but also with the moral state of the church that condones their employment. The soldiers are ‘hapless’ because they are not in control of what happens to them and the word is also aurally connected with ‘hopeless’ since, once they are enlisted, they have no hope of becoming free. Young men would have been recruited into the army by officers especially trained to make army life sound attractive and the pay good. Once they had accepted the ‘King’s shilling’ (the reward for joining up) however, the reality was very different and they became ‘cannon fodder’ in foreign wars, or were used to suppress their fellow citizens at home.

This is suggested in their ‘sigh’ – symbolic of sadness – that is imagined as blood running down the walls of the Palace – the residence of the King in whose name they fought.

Even these terrible sounds are not the worst, however, for the writer continues,

‘But most thro’ midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlots curse

Blasts the new-born Infants tear

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse’

Prostitution was rife in Blake’s London, as were the diseases that came with it. Children were sometimes forced into becoming prostitutes through hunger and desperation. Without means of protection, many young girls became pregnant and often died as a result either of dangerous abortion attempts or in childbirth. Even if they and their children survived, the baby could inherit a sexually transmitted disease. The curse of the Harlot is therefore against the men who use her, the State and the Church whose duty is to protect her and the society that allows these things to happen. Her curse takes more physical forms as well in the disease that ‘blasts the new-born Infants tear’ and also ‘blights with plagues the Marriage hearse’. The words ‘blight’,’blast’ and ‘plagues’ carry connotations of destruction and death, as does the ‘Marriage hearse’ which should be an oxymoron but refers to Blake’s view of marriage as legalised prostitution, where a woman would be contracted to the highest bidder, often having no say in whom she would marry and being a virtual slave to her husband thereafter. It also carries associations of the diseases that men who have been with prostitutes could take home to their wives.

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp,

Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears

And water’d heaven with their tears:

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,

In the forests of the night:

What immortal hand or eye,

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

This is probably Blake’s most famous poem; easy to remember because of its rhythmic verse and use of rhyming couplets, the animal itself holds a fascination for people, partly because of its beauty and partly because of the danger it represents. For Blake it is a symbol of righteous anger – the emotion he saw as driving progress. In ‘The Proverbs of Hell’ he wrote ‘The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction’ – instruction being associated with schoolmasters and priests.

The poem begins with an image of the creature,

‘Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night’

The tiger’s flame coloured stripes are associated with passion, while the light and dark of its coat shows both contrast and balance. Forests are associated with experience and therefore with danger. The narrator asks the first of a number of questions in the poem,

‘What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?’

While its creator must be immortal, it is a puzzle to know what kind of creator could make such a fearful creature – symmetry refers presumably to its patterning. More questions follow – all of them rhetorical since there can be no answer, and all of them directed to the origins of the tiger.

‘In what distant deeps or skies,

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?’

The ideas here of cosmic fire associated with the tiger adds to its grandeur with a suggestion of Prometheus (a character in Greek mythology) stealing fire from the Gods as a gift for man:

‘On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand dare seize the fire?’

There is also an echo of the Greek Icarus, flying too close to the sun and being flung to earth, but the impression is of something universal and even courageous.

The next stanza takes the idea of the tiger as a physical being;

‘And what shoulder, & what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

The identification of the parts of the tiger with the creator that made it gives it a supernatural power, while the connection of ‘shoulder’ with ‘art’ is suggesting the combination of physical strength and imagination required to produce such a creature. This is followed by the image of a blacksmith’s forge (perhaps an association with Vulcan, smith to the Gods?) which is also implicated in the making of the tiger:

‘What the hammer? What the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?’

The idea of the tiger’s creation being a combination of nature and creative art is taken a step further here, as though only a cosmic forge could produce sufficient heat to create its brain. The idea is reinforced by the hammering rhythm that runs throughout the poem.

The image of the stars as a heavenly army, throwing down their spears in surrender to the power of the tiger, or perhaps in horror at its creation, serves to extend the idea of its supernatural qualities. The question that follows, however, is at the heart of the poem and also at the heart of the songs;

‘Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the lamb make thee?

The belief in a single creator must extend to the belief that he who created good must also have created evil – the tiger and the lamb share the same world. They are the two contrary states of the human soul, representing the worlds of innocence and experience. If the lamb represents goodness, innocence and meekness, the tiger represents passion, wrath and energy.

The final stanza repeats that at the beginning, with the difference being that the question is no longer whether a creator would be able to ‘make’ the tiger, but how he could ‘dare’ to do so. The circular structure of the poem indicates the eternal nature of the questions and the themes within it. There is no real answer to the ‘problem of evil’ in the universe, or to whether the creator of the lamb would smile at his unleashing of the tiger. The words that are repeated throughout the poem, such as ‘dare’ and ‘dread’ suggest something at once brave and awful, while images of ‘burning’, ‘fire’ and ‘furnace’ suggest not only the tiger’s orange stripes but the two eyes in the darkness and the anger burning in its brain. Fire is associated with creation and destruction, with cleansing and with warmth. These contradictions are present in the world, just as good and evil are both present.