poem

The Tyger, Nov 3, 2026

William Blake

1 votes
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Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And, when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?

Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

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📖 About this poem

Blake's poem is built almost entirely out of questions, and that's the engine driving it. A speaker stands before a tiger and tries to imagine the maker capable of such a creature, piling up images of forges, hammers, and chains, as if the animal were hammered out like metal rather than born. The effect is awe shading into fear: beauty and violence fused in one "fearful symmetry." The hammering trochaic rhythm and tight rhyming couplets give the poem a relentless, almost mechanical beat, echoing the blacksmith imagery it describes. The most startling image comes at the end, when the speaker wonders whether the same god who made the gentle lamb could also have made this. That question still resonates because it's really about how one world contains both tenderness and terror, and whether that contradiction can be reconciled, or simply must be marveled at.