Practical Criticism The Tyger William Blake Essay

Practical Criticism: The Tyger William Blake Blakes poem The Tyger - written somewhere between 1785 and 1789 - was first published in Songs of Innocence and Experience. These two interconnected books of poetry were intended to show the two contrary states of the human soul. Appropriately enough The Tyger appeared in the second book, Experience, and has as its natural counter part The Lamb in Innocence. The Tyger as a poem is a perennial international favourite. It has been more frequently and widely published than any other poem in English. The diction and rhyme scheme of both poems suggest they were written for children which is ostensibly the intended audience for the Songs. However the choice of words and†¦show more content†¦In fact the imagery of the poem is arguably its most striking feature. There is repeated reference to flames with Burnt the fire of thine eyes? and use of words like furnace This automatically, within the context of the poem and of Songs as a whole, conjures up images of a puritanical vision of hell intimating the tiger satanic roots (see below). In the first stanza the alliteration of t and b, two hard consonants, enhances the sense of tension. When read aloud the alliteration encourages rapid reading and an staccato beat which encourages an audience to becomes involved in the urgency of the images. The four beats striking fairly evenly on each line and the aabb rhyme scheme allows ease and speed of reading aswell as directing concentration of the reader onto image rather than form. The Tyger is, aswell as being a strikingly visual poem, a very sonorous one. The regular beat, hard consonants and stressed first syllable provides and unstoppable beat which echoes the thump of the tigers heartbeat in stanza three. The throb of the poem not only ritualistic (chant-like), but mechanistic. The (pertinent) industrial imagery (discussed below) like furnace and chains and anvil call forth the repetitive clanking of factory sounds which combine with the thumping dread heartbeat and progression of dread feet of stanza three. All this: metre, industrial