The Tyger / Blake

"The Tyger" is a poem by the English poet William Blake. It was published as part of his collection Songs of Experience in 1794. It is one of Blake's best-known and most analyzed poems. The Cambridge Companion to William Blake (2003) calls it "the most anthologized poem in English."

Most modern anthologies have kept Blake's choice of the archaic spelling "tyger". It was a common spelling of the word at the time but was already "slightly archaic" when he wrote the poem; he spelled it as "tiger" elsewhere, and many of his poetic effects "depended on subtle differences of punctuation and of spelling." Thus, his choice of "tyger" has usually been interpreted as being for effect, perhaps to render an "exotic or alien quality of the beast", or because it's not really about a "tiger" at all, but a metaphor.

"The Tyger" is the sister poem to "The Lamb" (from "Songs of Innocence"), a reflection of similar ideas from a different perspective, but it focuses more on goodness than evil. The poem also presents a duality between aesthetic beauty and primal ferocity. The speaker wonders whether the hand that created "The Lamb" also created "The Tyger”.