The symbolic significance of key themes in William Blake's The Tyger

Tyger

The Unbearable Darkness of Knowledge

William Blake's poem "The Tyger" touches on many things, from nature to God to questions of good and evil. While there are many possible interpretations of this poem, one point is made clear above all else: knowledge to humanity, is by its very nature illusive and can be terrible once acquired. The tiger himself stands as a burning symbol of the hidden and awful nature of truth.

Many of the explicit lines and images in the poem directly refer to the fearsome yet unknown knowledge that must exist behind the tiger. The last couplet of the first stanza is a perfect example of the scared questioning the speaker engages in, asking "What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" (lines 3-4). As exacting as the symmetry of the fearful tiger is, the immortal hand or eye that framed it must be more fearsome, yet remains unknown. Even more explicitly, the last couplet of the third stanza expresses the speaker's "dread" at the prospect of encountering the tiger's maker: "And when thy heart began to beat, / What dread hand? & what dread feet?" (lines 11-12). The unknown hands and feet that are capable of creating the tiger cannot even be guessed at, yet are known to be dreadful.

On an explicit level, then, this poem is directly about the quest for knowledge but the certainty that it is both too distant and too terrible to ever be touched by mere mortals. Certain symbolism embedded in the tiger supports this interpretation; S. Foster Damon hypothesizes that, "Blake probably began the tyger with the creation of his eyes, because the Eye to Blake meant Intellect," meaning the tiger represents knowledge or the ability to know itself (p. 278). This knowledge or ability to acquire knowledge is not as terrible as the source of all knowledge, the creator of the tiger, but it is quite fearsome in its own right. Knowledge and the ability to learn, to think, and to analyze are terrible gifts, this interpretation says, not because they are not useful or powerful but because their power is both so capable of destruction and so limited in comparison with the giver/creator of this knowledge and ability.