{"id":229,"date":"2023-02-19T19:49:05","date_gmt":"2023-02-19T19:49:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/?p=229"},"modified":"2023-02-19T19:49:05","modified_gmt":"2023-02-19T19:49:05","slug":"the-tyger-and-the-sublime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/2023\/02\/19\/the-tyger-and-the-sublime\/","title":{"rendered":"The Tyger and the Sublime"},"content":{"rendered":"

A part of the wonderous collections of poetry in William Blake\u2019s The Songs of Innocence and of Experience<\/em>, the poem within Songs of Experience<\/em> titled \u201cThe Tyger\u201d critiques the malicious and devious nature of man as surely not being created by the like of an abstractly concrete \u201che\u201d (l. 19-20). This \u201che\u201d can be assumed to be a religious figure rather than a man walking the Earth, based solely on line 20 of the poem: \u201c[d]id he who made the lamb make thee?\u201d. The \u201clamb\u201d refers directly back to a poem found in The Songs of Innocence <\/em>portion of the collection called \u201cThe Lamb,\u201d in which Blake writes about the heavenly-made lamb that is a product of God [using \u201cHe\u201d as the reference]. These two related and contrary poems comment on the inculcation of sublime ideals within human nature and that human nature is constantly life-changing. Therefore, with a psychological lens applied to these poems, \u201cThe Tyger\u201d tears away from that sublime association with fresh experiences and presents humans, as they gain experience and age, as complex creatures that are no longer sublimely connected to the world but enact on their own volition and knowledge.<\/p>\n

In essence, the idea of the sublime is, roughly, about experiencing something that is overwhelming beautiful that it changes the person involved on a spiritual basis and is thought to be a good spiritual awakening\u2014in other words, \u201cthe echo of the great soul\u201d as the Longman Anthology writes, incidentally, \u201cThe Tyger\u201d doesn\u2019t present the human experience as completely sublime but rather haunting. The third stanza of the poem tells about the tyger\u2019s heart and the coldness that is freezing within it: \u201c[a]nd what shoulder, and what art,\/Could twist the sinews of thy heart?\/and when thy heart began to beat,\/What dread hand? And what dread feet?\u201d. (l. 9-12). The heart is empty and cold, as seen by the imagery of the shoulder, which is typically used to rely on in any hard situation, a steady presence in a person\u2019s life. However, given that the speaker questions what shoulder \u201ccould twist\u201d the tyger\u2019s heart sinews imply that the sublime relation to human nature has dissolved and had changed the tyger\u2019s thought on human relations. Also, the consistent use of \u201cdread\u201d throughout the poem feels antithetical to the concept of the sublime, and the speaker makes it known that the tyger is a dreadful creature with much life experience outside of the sublime that makes them a terror and wonder to view.<\/p>\n

So forth, there\u2019s implicit fear within the speaker that the tyger is what real people are like during the Industrial age, and they, the speaker cannot fathom this change. Blake uses industrial and mechanical imagery when describing the tyger, leading me to this conclusion. In the fourth stanza, the tyger is being asked what and how were they created: \u201cwhat the hammer? What the chain?\/In what furnace was thy brain made?\/What the anvil?…\u201d (l. 13-15). These images strictly contrast those of the sublime, which focuses on the picturesque and the beauty found within the world. So instead of being associated with \u201csuitable for painting,\u201d the tyger is the opposite, or the real version, of the sublime context that isn\u2019t intrinsically positively life-altering (Longman anthology, 34; l. 20). This entirely tears apart from the rapid association typically found in describing people or objects as inherently sublime, even sparking the speaker to reflect upon their fear by repeating the opening stanza as the final stanza. They question whether something immortal could have made something terrifying, just as it could create something so beautiful, like the lamb.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A part of the wonderous collections of poetry in William Blake\u2019s The Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the poem within Songs of Experience titled \u201cThe Tyger\u201d critiques the malicious and devious nature of man as surely not being created by the like of an abstractly concrete \u201che\u201d (l. 19-20). This \u201che\u201d can be assumed … Continue reading The Tyger and the Sublime<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5131,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spring-2023"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5131"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}