The Tyger

Say it aloud and you hear the forge in it: four hammer-strokes to the line, a rhythm that does not describe the making of the tiger so much as perform it. Something is burning its way through a dark wood, and Blake, instead of describing it, interrogates it. He wants to know what hand dared seize the fire, what chain, what anvil, what furnace held that brain, and he asks and asks and never once answers, until he reaches the question that has kept readers awake ever since: did he who made the Lamb make thee? There is the terror of it. The hand that shaped the gentlest thing beat this into shape too, and may have smiled to see it. Blake etched and coloured the plates himself, and the tiger he painted beneath the words looks oddly mild, almost apologetic, as if he could not draw what he had written. Then the stars throw down their spears and water heaven with their tears, and you feel the sky itself weeping over what has just come out of the fire.