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The Poet's Craftby Stewart Ferris

Week of 30 October 2026

Close readings

One public-domain poem a week, read for its joins: where the voice pauses, where the sentence runs past the line, and what the rhyme is being asked to do. The poem changes on Monday morning, London time. The archive does not.

How to read for the joins

A close reading on this site is not a biography of the poet and not a hunt for hidden messages. It is a description of three moves you can also make. The caesura is a pause inside the line — a comma, a dash, a question mark, or a hesitation the syntax forces. Enjambment is a sentence that refuses the line-end and finishes, or contradicts itself, on the next line. The rhyme scheme is the promise that a sound will return, and the interest is in whether the poet keeps the promise, slants it, or lets it decay because the subject has decayed.

Cover the next line with your hand. If the visible line dies, the break is probably only typing. If it survives and still wants something, the break is doing work. Then say the rhyme aloud. If you can predict it, ask whether prediction is the joke. These are the questions under every reading in the archive.

This week: The Tyger

William Blake, 1794. Trochaic quatrains. Rhyme: AABB.

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 spearsAnd 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?
The Tyger — William Blake

Read it aloud and you will not need a handbook to find the metre. “TY-ger TY-ger” is a trochee, a falling beat, and the poem rarely lets you forget it. Trochaic tetrameter with the last unstressed syllable often shaved off — that catalectic clip — is why the lines feel like hammer blows rather than like walking. Blake is not describing a tiger. He is forging one, and the rhythm is the forge.

The rhyme is couplets, AABB, the most naive scheme in English and here the most frightening. Couplets close every two lines, the way a question closes and is not answered. “Bright / night,” “eye / symmetry.” Symmetry is the only rhyme that strains. The word is longer, more Latin, harder to say, and it sits where a song would have put a simple chime. The animal’s form is the awkward rhyme. Blake leaves it awkward on purpose.

The full reading of The Tyger follows the pauses, the runs, and the scheme through the whole poem, and ends with a writing exercise.

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