Blake’s poem abandons an otherwise perfect rhyme scheme in order to draw attention to the word “symmetry” in the fourth line — letting it ring out, somewhat awkwardly, against the preceding line’s “eye.” It’s clearly significant, and demands a closer inspection.
We should begin by considering the significance of a tiger to the contemporary reader. A person of Blake’s time would regard a tiger as something more like a mythical beast than an actual animal. The tiger stood in the Western imagination as a kind of symbol for the exotic and ancient cultures of the “Orient.” Its aggressive coloring clearly marks its essential foreignness: an intimidating creature, violent in reputation, behavior and appearance, unlike anything else on the planet. The poem’s accompanying illustration, provided by the poet himself, has an almost psychedelic quality. The animal’s strangeness is exaggerated, a quality only further highlighted by the poet’s use of the unorthodox spelling “tyger.”
The tiger’s alien appearance is not all that’s meant by “fearful symmetry,” though. Let’s instead examine the tiger in terms of Blake’s broader symbolic lexicon. Blake was what we could call a “system-builder,” and he over the course of his career developed and articulated an entire “mythology” incorporating his metaphysical and religious beliefs. The collection in which “The Tyger” appeared, Songs of Innocence and Experience, was divided into two volumes. Blake was inspired by John Milton’s exploration of the “Fall of Man” in Paradise Lost to explore poetically the loss of innocence that comes with the end of childhood. The naive and guileless Songs of Innocence give way to the darker, gloomier Songs of Experience. The theme of an impossible but necessary unity of perfect opposites dominates the whole of his poetry, perhaps most clearly in his later work “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” This idea is never far from any Blake poem.
“The Tyger,” as we might expect, appears in the latter volume. It is a “Song of Experience.” As you might also expect, it has an antecedent in the preceding half — a poem called “The Lamb.” Like “The Tyger,” “The Lamb” begins with the speaker posing a question:
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Compare to “The Tyger”:
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
A little later in “The Tyger,” Blake states the connection directly:
“Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”
The “fearful symmetry” is between the lamb and the tiger themselves. It is the same creator who “twisted the sinews of [the tyger’s] heart” that gave the lamb her “tender voice.” When the poet asks “what shoulder, and what art” could create something so terrifying as the tiger, he already knows the answer. The creation of the lamb necessitates the creation of the tiger; the existence of the Songs of Innocence implies that of the Songs of Experience; the perfection of Eden demanded the horror of the Fall. This is the harmony of opposites, each in proportion: a fearful symmetry, indeed.
At the core of Blake’s metaphysics lies a point at which difference itself melts away. The speaker and the audience, man and woman, the tiger and the lamb are all of one essence. The nature of this essence cannot be comprehended by normal means. For Blake, it lies at a point just beyond the limit of conventional human reason. Because it lies somewhere beyond this limit, it is said to be “mystic” in nature — one must undergo a transcendental experience to truly reach it. This is also why Blake’s poetry is said to fall within the “prophetic” tradition. He viewed his work as a vehicle for an ineffable truth: the “fearful symmetry” found in all creation, all experience: the hidden nature of our world. As Blake himself would later write, “if the doors of perception were cleansed, life would appear to man as it is: infinite.”
This line is within a larger question that the speaker poses in "The Tyger":
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Within the creation of the tiger is a much bigger question that centers around the essence of the Creator. If God works as a craftsman to create every wonderful thing, does He then also work in "symmetry" to create a counterbalance of darkness?
The perfect symmetry of a tiger then, its perfect form and shape, has a counterbalance: It is capable of great devastation. The speaker is questioning whether both goodness and darkness originate from the same Creator. If there is innocence (I often teach this poem in conjunction with "The Lamb," which elicits this opposing image of God's creation and is also written by Blake), then must there also be corruption? If there is beauty, must there then also be fear?
The speaker provides no answers about the "symmetry" of God's design but allows readers to discern this answer for themselves.
In order to grasp the meaning of the phrase "fearful symmetry" in "The Tyger" by William Blake, it's important to understand it in the context of the entire poem. At the end of the first stanza and again at the end of the overall poem, Blake asks the question, "What immortal hand or eye, dare frame thy fearful symmetry?" Blake was a Christian writer, and in this poem he wonders whether God, who created so much good, could have also created a creature of such deadly power as a tiger. The poem asks,
Did he smile his work to see?Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
In these lines, "he" refers to God, and Blake wonders whether God would feel joy at the creation of the tiger, which, though visually beautiful, destroys and devours other creatures. "The Lamb" is symbolic of Jesus Christ (as well as referring to meek, innocent creatures), and Blake questions whether the same God who created Jesus Christ could possibly have created the frightening tiger.
The phrase "fearful symmetry" is a summation of the question that Blake poses, but does not really answer, in the poem. "Symmetry" means the beauty inherent in the excellence or perfection of proportion. The concept of symmetry would not normally be frightening. When Blake adds the adjective "fearful" to symmetry, he suggests something that doesn't fit and that cannot be explained. In other words, he questions the creation of evil by God, when God is supposed to create only beauty and perfection.
What Blake is trying to do here is convey the sheer awe and sense of wonder that the tiger inspires. The tiger is “fearful,” in that it induces fear in all who see it. At the same time, it has “symmetry” in its appearance, a sense of balance and proportion traditionally associated with objects of great beauty. So in other words, Blake presents the tiger as being scary and beautiful at the same time.
As well as being scary and beautiful, the tiger is also sublime. Its savage wildness cannot be neatly contained, or “framed,” as the poem has it. As the tiger emerges from the forests of the night, it isn’t subjected to any boundaries; this is real life, not a painting where the action can be framed. Not even God himself, the “immortal hand or eye,” can control or contain the tiger’s fearsome beauty, which takes on a life of its own.
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