from What is Poetry?

When I first read Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ as an undergraduate at the University of Leeds in the 1980s, I’m not sure what I made of it. When I wrote an essay on Blake I was more interested in the intertextuality of Blake’s Milton, his reimagining of Milton’s Satan. I skirted round ‘The Tyger’, probably because I didn’t know what it meant, and in the essays we were required to write the meaning of the poems was something which, though I was only half-conscious of this at the time, needed to take centre stage – the machinery of the poems, their architecture, their rhymes, their design, their metaphors, were all in the service of a greater meaning. We interpreted the poems, in a word, extracting some hidden meaning from them, as if they carried some kind of message. And ‘The Tyger’ didn’t fit this reading model very well. I’m sure I thought it was loosely saying something about the nature of God – ‘What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?’ – and I remember being puzzled by Blake’s illustration to the poem where he depicts a rather placid-looking beast, whereas I imagined a tiger more along the lines of Henri Rousseau’s Surprised! – lean, muscular, fierce, and about to pounce. Blake, I concluded, couldn’t draw.

It’s not how I read poems today, and when I look at ‘The Tyger’ now, I’m struck most of all by the word ‘symmetry’ – a key word in the poem as Helen Vendler would put it. And I’m struck by the way the subject matter of the poem, the symmetry or fearful symmetry of ...