William Blake

William Blake

Blake’s life

William Blake was born in London in 1757.he was a painter, poet, engraver. From childhood, Blake is full of a wealth of imagination, and often through fantasy. He gave pictures for his own poetry accompanied by images and in a mystical sense to show works of significance. His painting was about God, Pain, Loss, Death, and Life and so on. He was educated at Henry Pars Drawing School. After becoming established as a graphic designer and drawing tutor, he opened a print shop in London in 1784. He lived in Sussex from 1800 to 1803, during which time he was charged with high treason but acquitted. He returned to London and staged a rather unsuccessful show of his artistic work in 1809, after which he went into obscurity and became a mystic. During his own lifetime, Blake was a pronounced failure, and he harbored a good deal of resentment (怨恨) and anxiety about the public’s apathy toward his work and about the financial straits in which he so regularly found himself. When his self- crated exhibition of his works met with financial failure in 1809, Blake sank into depression and withdrew into obscurity; he remained alienated(感到孤独的) for the rest of his life. His contemporaries saw him as something of an eccentric--as indeed he was. Suspended between the neoclassicism(新古典主义) of the 18th century and the early phases of Romanticism, Blake belongs to no single poetic school or age. Only in the 20th century did wide audiences begin to acknowledge his profound originality and genius.

Literarily Black was the first important romantic poet, showing contempt for the rule of reason, opposite the classical tradition of the 18th century, and treasuring the individual's imagination. Black writing his poems in plain a direct language. He presents his view in visual images rather that abstract ideas. Symbolism in wide range is a distinctive feature of his poetry.

Blake’s major works

Poetical Sketches<<诗歌素描>>（1783）：his earliest poems, full of joy, laughter,

love and harmony.

Collections of Blake’s Short Lyrics:

Songs of Innocence<<天真之歌>>(1789):present a happy and innocent world,

though with its evils and sufferings. However, in “The little black boy” and “The chimney sweeper”, we find racial discrimination and sufferings of the poor.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell<<天堂与地狱的结合>>(1790): his first

prophetical work and most important prose work；explore the relationship of the contraries.

Songs of Experience <<经验之歌>>(1794): present a world of misery, poverty,

disease, war and repression with a melancholy tone.

Collection of Blake’s Long poems:

Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1820): his longest illuminated

work; expound his theory of imagination

Most popular poem: The Tiger (Songs of Experience) Companion poem: The Lamb (Songs of Innocence) London (Songs of Experience) The Chimney Sweeper (Songs of Innocence) Appreciation: “The Tiger” from Songs of Experience

Structure and Rhyme Scheme

The poem consists of six quatrains. (A quatrain is a four-line stanza.) Each quatrain contains two couplets. (A couplet is a pair of rhyming lines). Thus we have a 24-line poem with 12 couplets and 6 stanzas–a neat, balanced package.

Theme

The poem presents a question that embodies the theme: Who created the tiger? Was it the kind and loving God who made the lamb? Or was it Satan? Blake presents his question in Lines 3 and 4:

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Blake realizes, of course, that God made all the creatures on earth. However, to express his bewilderment that the God who created the gentle lamb also created the terrifying tiger, he includes Satan as a possible creator while raising his rhetorical questions, notably the one he asks in Lines 5 and 6:

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thy eyes?

Deeps appears to refer to hell and skies to heaven. In either case, there

would be fire--the fire of hell or the fire of the stars.

Of course, there can be no gainsaying that the tiger symbolizes evil, or the incarnation of evil, and that the lamb (Line 20) represents goodness, or Christ. Blake's inquiry is a variation on an old philosophical and theological question: Why does evil exist in a universe created and ruled by a benevolent God? Blake provides no answer. His mission is to reflect reality in arresting images. A poet’s first purpose, after all, is to present the world and its denizens in language that stimulates the aesthetic sense; he is not to exhort or moralize. Nevertheless, the poem does stir the reader to deep thought. Here is the tiger, fierce and brutal in its quest for sustenance; there is the lamb, meek and gentle in its quest for survival. Is it possible that the same God who made the lamb also made the tiger? Or was the tiger the devil's work?

Meaning of the Poem

Stanza 1: What immortal being created this terrifying creature which, with its perfect proportions (symmetry), is an awesome killing machine?

Stanza 2: Was it created in hell (distant deeps) or in heaven (skies)? If the creator had wings, how could he get so close to the fire in which the tiger was created? How could he work with so blazing a fire?

Stanza 3: What strength (shoulder) and craftsmanship (art) could make the tiger's heart? What being could then stand before it (feet) and shape it further (hand)?

Stanza 4: What kind of tool (hammer) did he use to fashion the tiger in the forge fire? What about the chain connected to the pedal which the maker used to pump the bellows? What of the heat in the furnace and the anvil on which the maker hammered out his creation? How did the maker muster the courage to grasp the tiger?

Stanza 5: When the stars cast their light on the new being and the clouds cried, was the maker pleased with his creation?

Stanza 6: The poet repeats the central question of the poem, stated in Stanza 1. However, he changes could (Line 4) to dare (Line 24). This is a significant change, for the poet is no longer asking who had the capability of creating the tiger but

who dared to create so frightful a creature.

Figures of Speech

Paradox: If the maker of the tiger also made the lamb.

Metaphor: Comparison of the tiger to a fire.

Anaphora (首语重复法): Repetition of what at the beginning of sentences or clauses. Example: What dread hand and what dread feet? / What the hammer? What the chain?

Musical beauty of the poem

Trochaic (stressed syllable with unstressed syllable) to imitate the sound in a forge;

Alliteration (burning bright);

Assonance (tiger and night);

Sounds rhythmical; Regular end rhyme；Repetition

Allusions in the poem:

In line 8 a possible reference to Prometheus; to Satan and his angels in lines 17

and 18; and also to the God of Old Testament

The simple use of exclamation points after the word “Tiger” help to emphasize the urgency of the question.

Symbolism

The creation verbs “twist,” “dare,” “burnt,” and “seize” emphasize the danger and daring of the creation act, while the place of creation is described as a distant, fiery, furnace. And the “hammer,” “anvil,” and “furnace” are images of an industrial revolution which Blake would have seen approaching in his lifetime.

The creator persona featured in the poem “twisted the sinews” of the tiger heart. These sinews are the tendons which make the heart work; they are the source of power, the biological engine as well as a symbol of the tiger’s passion for living.

“The Tiger” has been described by one critic as Blake’s “most fully developed art - a process using small revelations leading to greater discoveries through profound use of symbol. ”

Bibliography

诸葛晓初.Words for Fearful Symmetry: A Stylistic Analysis of The Tiger［J］.海外

英语.2010(03)

郭天奎.Since Lamb is Made, Why is Tiger Created, Then------An Analysis of “The Lamb” and “The Tiger”［J］.川东学刊。1997（03）