The following version of this poem was used to create this guide: Blake, William. “The Tyger.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43687/the-tyger.

Note that parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the lines of the poem from which the quotations are taken.

“The Tyger” is a 24-line trochaic tetrameter poem written by the English poet and painter William Blake. Composed as the counterpart, or in Blake’s terminology “contrary,” of his earlier poem “The Lamb,” “The Tyger” questions the Christian themes of creation presented in “The Lamb” by wondering if the same creator could be responsible for both the tender lamb and the terrifying tiger. Both poems, alongside their respective illustrations, were included in Blake’s 1794 collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Where Blake connects the lamb to innocence, he links the tiger with experience. Through a series of unanswered questions, “The Tyger” asks readers to consider the dualities, or contraries, that constitute the truth of life on earth.

The poem both opens and closes with the unnamed speaker addressing the “Tyger” directly and asking to whom it owes its creation. In between, the speaker unspools a stream of questions about where and with what technology the different parts of the Tyger were created. The penultimate stanza questions the link between the maker of the Lamb and the maker of the Tyger. The poem then ends almost as it began, but with the speaker asking who would dare to create the Tyger.