For my blog post today, I chose to talk about William Blake’s poem The Tyger. A fun fact I learned recently about this poem is that it is considered to be one of the most famous poems William Blake ever wrote throughout his career.

To begin, I liked this poem because it directly connects to his other poem, The Lamb. The fact these two poems were connected was interesting to me. I have not read many poems by the same author before where they connect the two in such a unique way.

To me, the two main themes of this poem are foundation, and the beginning or start of something. In one of the last stanzas, Blake wonders if the same person who created the tyger is the same person who created the lamb. Throughout the poem, he is admiring the qualities of the tyger, such as its raw beauty, and how fearsome it is. He finds similar qualities as he is observing the lamb as well, which leads him to wonder if the same person created both the creatures. I felt as if this was an interesting way to connect the two poems, and I do not think I have ever seen it been done like this before. 

    I chose to do a poetry explication on this one. At first, when I read this poem in my head, it seemed pretty bland, and almost emotionless. Once I read it out loud, it totally changed the whole tone of the poem for me, and added a lot of emotion to it. It is strange how different the poem can sound to you when reading it in your head, and then when you read it out loud. A few lines that I found bland when I read in my head, but more emotion was added to them once I read out loud was “Tyger Tyger burning bright, in the forests of the night: what immortal hand or I, dare frame by fearful symmetry?“ 

When reading those lines out loud, I found that it gave the poem more of a mysterious ending to it than it did when I was reading those lines in my head. After reading the poem twice through, both different ways of reading it, it really helped me to think about the deeper meanings of the poem and understand the emotions behind it more. Reading it in my head definitely made me think about the surface meanings, like how he is observing the tyger for all that it is, but reading it out loud gave his observation of the tyger more emotion, and how the poem is more than just him observing it, it is what he is observing on the animal, and about it, as well as how he is observing it and what he is seeing the animal in depth for.