William Blake
The Tyger
Trochaic quatrains. 1794. The rhyme scheme is AABB. What follows is a reading of the pauses, the line-breaks, and the sounds that return — not a life of the poet.
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?
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.
Almost every line is end-stopped. There is very little enjambment, because a question that ran over the line would sound like conversation. These questions are blows. The caesuras are inside the later stanzas, where the smithing starts: “What the hammer? what the chain,” — two questions, one line, a pause where the hammer would fall. “What dread hand? & what dread feet?” The question mark in the middle of the line is a caesura that breaks the tool away from the body.
Stanza five is the only place the poem looks away from the tiger. The stars throw down their spears. For two lines the metre still marches, but the image is of surrender. Then the couplet asks the question the whole poem has been avoiding, and it asks it in the plainest syntax Blake has used: “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” No metaphor in the line. The caesura is the whole previous poem, standing between Lamb and thee.
The last stanza repeats the first with one changed word. “Could” becomes “Dare.” That is the poem’s volta, and it is a single verb. A lesser poet would have added a stanza of moral. Blake changes the auxiliary. “Could” is capacity. “Dare” is courage, or guilt. The rhyme scheme does not change. The frame does not change. The fear does. If you are revising a poem that circles, look for the one word that must not survive the circle.
Punctuation in Blake’s plate is part of the rhythm: the ampersands, the missing comma in the last “Tyger Tyger.” You do not have to imitate eighteenth-century accident. You do have to notice that a repeated stanza which is not quite repeated is a form of enjambment across the whole poem. The white space between stanza one and stanza six is where the dare is forged.
The joins
- Metre. Trochees fall. They suit spells, accusations, and anything struck rather than said. If your subject is being made by force, try a falling metre before you reach for iambs.
- Caesura. A question mark in the middle of a line is a hammer-pause. Use it when the line contains two blows, not one.
- Repetition. Bring a stanza back, but change the verb that carries the morality. The reader will hear the change because the rest is identical.
More readings are kept in the weekly archive. The craft lesson closest to this poem’s method is Rhythm.